Could Jesus Christ Himself Become Speaker?

The White Supremacist QAnon Trump Terrorist Party’s shockingly inept attempt to elect a Speaker of the House from its own ranks took a dramatic turn last night with Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s announcement that she would be nominating Jesus Christ Himself as Speaker on the floor of the House today. In her statement, Greene, a self-described Christian Nationalist, said “We have always opened every House session with a prayer to Jesus Christ Himself, and given our failures over the past two weeks, it’s time to cut out the middleman and elect Jesus Christ Himself as Speaker.”

Anticipating questions about Jesus Christ Himself’s availability to fill that role, given that he has not been seen in public since his resurrection over 2,000 years ago, Greene revealed that her office, after receiving an anonymous tip one week ago, had been able to verify that Jesus Christ Himself had in fact returned to Earth in 2016 and since then had been living quietly in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. Greene also made the bombshell announcement that she had personally met with Jesus Christ Himself in New York City two days ago and had convinced him to fly to Washington D.C. today to hold a press conference at her office and meet with GOP members. (“He insisted on flying coach and paying for his ticket himself,” Greene revealed.)

As the nation’s capital anxiously awaited Jesus Christ Himself’s arrival, reporters descended on House parliamentarian Jason Smith to question him about whether Jesus Christ Himself would be eligible to assume the Speakership under the Constitution. Smith clarified that there are only two requirements specifically mentioned in the Constitution for assuming the role of Speaker: that one must be nominated by a House member and approved by a majority of House members.

Jesus Christ Himself’s press conference had to be moved to the much larger Rayburn Room in the Capitol after the entire GOP Congressional Caucus asked to attend and to have their photographs taken with him. Congressional Democrats were not allowed access to the press conference.

Congresswoman Greene began the press conference by introducing Jesus Christ Himself. Physically, the candidate in no way resembled how he has been depicted historically. A short, swarthy, man of Arab descent with piercing black eyes, Jesus Christ Himself was dressed casually in a denim jacket, a Tom Waits T-shirt, jeans, and sandals. He appeared to be lean and in good health. He exhibited some discomfort during Congresswoman Greene’s introduction, in which she noted that he had appeared in Washington at the behest of the White Supremacist QAnon Trump Terrorist Party, not the Democrats, and that her guest was “stoked” to assume a leadership role in the GOP and solve the Speaker crisis. Greene mentioned that she had attempted to get former President Donald Trump to attend the press conference with Jesus Christ Himself, but that her party’s presumptive 2024 Presidential nominee told her that he preferred that Jesus Christ Himself visit him at a later date in Mar-A-Lago.

Jesus Christ Himself looked uncomfortable as he took a place in front of the microphone at a makeshift podium emblazoned with a graphic of a tall, blue-eyed, and exceedingly muscular Jesus draped in the American flag and hurling thunderbolts at human figures clearly representing Hispanics and transgender people. Jesus Christ Himself announced that he would be dispensing with an opening statement and said that he would go directly to taking questions from reporters.

Asked why he had returned to Earth in 2016 after such a long absence, Jesus Christ Himself said that after reading in the media about the rise of hate groups around the globe during that time and what he perceived as their inappropriate invocation of his name and teachings, he had decided to return and once again try to set the right example for humanity. Jesus Christ Himself told reporters that he had earned a law degree from Fordham University and for the past four years had been working as a public defender in the legal system in the Bronx.

“I live simply,” he claimed. “A fourth-floor walk-up with no laundry in the building. My rent takes up more than half of my salary. What the hell happened to rent control in New York City, anyway? Is Eric Adams here? I wanted to ask him about that. Working as a public defender seemed like a great fit for me. The poor are blessed, and theirs is the kingdom of God. Dad anointed me to bring good news to the poor and to release the captives. Like I’ve always said, don’t go around judging people unless you’re ready to be judged yourself. And if you don’t forgive the crimes of others, the Old Man is not going to give you a break for yours.”

Asked about his knowledge of, and assumed support for, the GOP platform, Jesus Christ Himself commented, “Hey, they came to me. I didn’t come to them.”

What followed was a series of questions from reporters about the White Supremacist QAnon Trump Terrorist Party’s agenda.

Queried about the death penalty, Jesus Christ Himself was curt: “That one’s really pretty simple, people. We’ve been over and over this. Thou shalt not kill. Next question.”

That subsequent question concerned tax breaks for the tiny few who own most of the wealth. “Sheesh, do I really have to over this again?” asked Jesus Christ Himself. “This is Bible Basics 101. You can’t serve God and money. You don’t measure a person’s life by counting his possessions. Everybody’s frantically filling their homes with earthly treasures, but that stuff is only made to be destroyed by moths, vermin, and thieves. Elon Musk is going to have a rough time checking in upstairs when his number is called, I can tell you that. Look what he did to the Twitter shareholders! And those damn cars of his are literally running over the innocent.”

At this point, loud mutterings and shocked gasps had begun to emanate from the crowd of GOP notables surrounding the podium.

Asked if he was aware of the current highly polarized political situation, Jesus Christ Himself rolled his eyes and said, “Hey, back in the day we had to constantly triangulate between the Romans, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees. They were all grifters who preyed upon the poor and worked hard to use religion to keep everyone at each other’s throats, and in the end the only thing they worked together on was to nail me.”

A reporter shouted, “Which is the most Christian of the two political parties?” and Jesus Christ answered, “Whichever prays the least in public. If you feel the need to pray, for God’s sake go into the closet and shut the door.”

It was at this point that Rep. Paul Gosar grabbed the microphone and interposed his body between Jesus Christ Himself and reporters. Rep. Matt Gaetz and Rep. Green each took hold of Jesus Christ Himself’s arms, Rep. Lauren Boebert dropped to her knees and wrapped her arms tightly around his slim thighs, and the trio began struggling to remove their guest through a door in the back of the Rayburn Room. As he was led away, Jesus Christ Himself could be heard shouting plaintively, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you! Sell your stuff and give it to the poor! Love your neighbors and your enemies! This is not rocket science, people!”

The GOP politicians could not contain their fury as they reacted to the chaotic scene and to Jesus Christ Himself’s controversial remarks.

“Jesus fucking Christ! Who the hell was that! Whoever he was, he was no Jesus. That was a RINO!” sputtered Rep. Kevin McCarthy.

“Hell, that was a JINO!” interjected Congressman Thomas Massie over McCarthy’s shoulder.

Even before she left the Rayburn Room, Marjorie Taylor Green had posted this on X: “Leave it to the communist Demoncrats to hatch a sickening conspiracy that involved hiring a pedophile impostor to mock our Lord and Saviour.”

Greene’s comment was one of the first of what became by late afternoon today a tsunami of threats against Jesus Christ Himself on social media, many of which called for him to be publicly crucified.

Jim Jordan also declared Jesus Christ Himself’s press conference to be a “hoax” and vowed to convene an investigative committee as soon as his party managed chose a new Speaker.

Fox News did not cover the press conference. Instead, the lead story on its web site was an unconfirmed report that Kamala Harris had paid a gang of Black homosexuals to steal classified documents and plant them inside a box of old Penthouse magazines in a bathroom in the private residence at Mar-A-Lago.

The whereabouts of Jesus Christ Himself are not currently known, although there have been reports that he and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were seen laughing and having drinks together this afternoon at La Famosa, a Puerto Rican restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C.

How To Avoid the Coming Civil War: Finding the Common Middle Ground

Okay, you're right. You've convinced me.

The only way for this profoundly divided country to come back together and move forward is for both sides to focus on the common ground, commit to having a respectful dialogue, and accept compromise. So I'm going to do that.

As a first step, I've been reading about this weekend's Texas Republican Party convention to better understand that tribe's beliefs. Once I dispassionately educate myself, I can figure out what positions represent a point equidistant between the beliefs of Republicans and my own and accept them as that "common ground" that everyone talks about but struggles to specify.

The Texas Republicans officially declared that Joe Biden "was not legitimately elected. I believe that he was. The "common ground In the middle" position, then, would be to accept that Biden and Trump BOTH won the Presidency and will have to co-govern the country.

The Texas Republicans officially rebuked their own Senator, John Cornyn, for participating in bipartisan negotiations on gun control. In fact, they booed Cornyn when he showed up to speak at the convention. I support such talks, but I am willing to compromise on the obvious "common ground In the middle" position, which would be to nix bipartisan negotiations In favor of partisan talks in which each side is allowed to talk to itself.

The Texas Republicans officially declared that homosexuality is "an abnormal lifestyle choice." I don't believe that people choose to be homosexual or that one's innate sexual preference should be labeled as abnormal. But in the interest of cooperation, I'm willing to compromise by supporting the position that heterosexuals are people who have chosen a normal lifestyle. 

The Texas Republicans officially called for Texas schoolchildren “to learn about the humanity of the preborn child"and that life begins at fertilization. I personally don't believe that a zygote is a "child," but I will accept the "common ground in the middle." The average age In the United States is 38.6 years. Let's add four and a half months to account for half of a standard pregnancy. So the compromise will be that schoolchildren will be required to learn about the humanity of 38-year-old Americans.

The Texas Republicans adopted a platform that declared that people under 21 are the group "most likely to need to defend themselves" and may need to quickly buy guns "in emergencies such as riots." I believe that assault rifles should be banned for everyone, not just those under 21, but I'm going to swallow hard and buy into the "common ground in the middle": in the future, only Americans under the age of 21 can purchase assault rifles, since they have the greatest need.

The Texas Republicans agreed that red-flag laws violate the due process of people who haven't convicted of a crime. Personally, I don't think that people who have been convicted of a violent crime should be allowed to buy firearms. But I'm going to suspend that belief in favor of "the common-ground middle." People who have committed violent crimes will be able to possess firearms, but they will have to wear a yellow flag so that we know who they are before we marry them.

The Texas Republicans also established that their policy Is to prohibit the “teaching, exposure, and/or discussion of sexual matters (mechanics, feelings, orientation or ‘gender identity’ issues),” and remove related books or materials from schools. As Cindi Castilla, a member of the platform committee, put it: “The issue of gender has nothing to do with education. Education is about reading, writing, math, science, history and fine arts. Maybe some foreign language and PE." I believe that "sexual matters" are fundamental to the teaching of biology, and that biology should be taught In school. But to reach "the common ground In the middle" with Ms. Castilla and other Republicans, I'm okay with ruling that biology should be removed from the school curriculum to make room for more PE and foreign language (except for Chinese and Spanish, which are too controversial).

Thinking through these “common-ground in the middle” solutions was kind of hard, but I got there. I earned a lot about myself and the other side. I feel good about shedding my personal beliefs and finding that beautifully manucured, sensible fifty-yard line that years of relentless partisanship totally obscured. 

I also learned that it’s critical that we understand our history so that we don’t repeat our past mistakes.

At one time. long ago, Americans were also deeply divided—over the issue of slavery. Neither side was willing to compromise, and as a result we fought a terrible Civil War in which hundreds of thousands of Americans were killed by other Americans.

Instead, we should have compromised. We could have found that “common ground in the middle,’ which in this crucial case would have had the United States declare an end to legal slavery but replace it with a system in which African Americans, while no longer technically slaves, could still be exploited economically and kept from attaining actual political power. 

If we had only had the wisdom to do that in 1860, we wouldn’t have the kind of partisanship that is tearing us apart today.

While We Were Debating the Slap Seen 'Round the World, a Federal Judge Begged the Justice Department to Indict Donald Trump

John Eastman, the lawyer who authored the legal “justification” for Trump’s illegal plan to stop the Electoral Count on January 6, filed a lawsuit to prevent Congress’ January 6th committee from obtaining 111 documents that it subpoenaed from him, arguing attorney-client privilege. 

Eastman and the committee agreed to let the judge in the case, David Carter, review all 111 documents and decide whether they should be given to Congress. Carter ruled today that 101 of the documents be given to Congress. 

Carter’s analysis of the evidence also led him to conclude in the ruling that Eastman and Trump “more likely than not” engaged in illegal activity, and that both knew that their claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent and that Vice President Pence had the power to stop the count were false.

Carter’s 44-page opinion should be required reading for all Americans. The following are some his most startling findings after his review of the evidence. Carter is ruling in a civil case, but his decision is really a plea to the Justice Department to indict Trump and Eastman. (Every statement of fact in his opinion has a citation to its source. I’ve removed those citations in these quotations from Carters ruling, which follow:)

In the months following the election, numerous credible sources–from the President’s inner circle to agency leadership to statisticians–informed President Trump and Dr. Eastman that there was no evidence of election fraud. One week after the election, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency declared “[t]he November 3rd election [] the most secure in American history” and found “no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” An internal Trump Campaign memo concluded in November that fraud claims related to Dominion voting machines were baseless. In early December, Attorney General Barr publicly stated there was no ev idence of fraud, and on December 27, Deputy Attorney General Donoghue privately told President Trump that after “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews,” the Department of Justice had concluded that “the major allegations [of election fraud] are not supported by the evidence developed.” President Trump repeatedly urged that “the Department [of Justice] should publicly say that the election is corrupt or suspect or not reliable.” 

By early January, more than sixty court cases alleging fraud had been dismissed for lack of evidence or lack of standing.

On January 4, President Trump and Dr. Eastman invited Vice President Pence, the Vice President’s counsel Greg Jacob, and the Vice President’s Chief of Staff Marc Short to the Oval Office to discuss Dr. Eastman’s memo. Dr. Eastman presented only two courses of action for the Vice President on January 6: to reject electors or delay the count. During that meeting, Vice President Pence consistently held that he did not possess the authority to carry out Dr. Eastman’s proposal.

The Vice President’s counsel and chief of staff were then directed to meet separately with Dr. Eastman the next day to review materials in support of his plan. Dr. Eastman opened the meeting on January 5 bluntly: “I’m here asking you to reject the electors.” Vice President’s counsel Greg Jacob and Dr. Eastman spent the majority of the meeting in a Socratic debate on the merits of the memo’s legal arguments. Over the course of their discussion, Dr. Eastman’s focus pivoted from requesting Vice President Pence reject the electors to asking him to delay the count, which he presented as more “palatable.” Ultimately, Dr. Eastman conceded that his argument was contrary to consistent historical practice, would likely be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court,38 and violated the Electoral Count Act on four separate grounds

President Trump facilitated two meetings in the days before January 6 that were explicitly tied to persuading Vice President Pence to disrupt the Joint Session of Congress. On January 4, President Trump and Dr. Eastman hosted a meeting in the Oval Office with Vice President Pence, the Vice President’s counsel Greg Jacob, and the Vice President’s Chief of Staff Marc Short. At that meeting, Dr. Eastman presented his plan to Vice President Pence, focusing on either rejecting electors or delaying the count.210 When Vice President Pence was unpersuaded, President Trump sent Dr. Eastman to review the plan in depth with the Vice President’s counsel on January 5. Vice President Pence’s counsel interpreted Dr. Eastman’s presentation as being on behalf of the President.

On the morning of January 6, President Trump made several last-minute “revised appeal[s] to the Vice President” to pressure him into carrying out the plan. At 1:00 am, President Trump tweeted: “If Vice President @Mike_Pence comes through for us, we will win the Presidency . . . Mike can send it back!” At 8:17 am, President Trump tweeted: “All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!” Shortly after, President Trump rang Vice President Pence and once again urged him “to make the call” and enact the plan. Just before the Joint Session of Congress began, President Trump gave a speech to a large crowd on the Ellipse in which he warned, “[a]nd Mike Pence, I hope you’re going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you. I will tell you right now.” President Trump ended his speech by galvanizing the crowd to join him in enacting the plan: “[L]et’s walk down Pennsylvania Avenue” to give Vice President Pence and Congress “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”

Together, these actions more likely than not constitute attempts to obstruct an official proceeding.

A person violates § 1512(c) when they obstruct an official proceeding with a corrupt mindset. The Ninth Circuit has not defined “corruptly” for purposes of this statute. However, the court has made clear that the threshold for acting “corruptly” is lower than “consciousness of wrongdoing,” meaning a person does not need to know their actions are wrong to break the law. Because President Trump likely knew that the plan to disrupt the electoral count was wrongful, his mindset exceeds the threshold for acting “corruptly” under § 1512(c).

President Trump and Dr. Eastman justified the plan with allegations of election fraud— but President Trump likely knew the justification was baseless, and therefore that the entire plan was unlawful. Although Dr. Eastman argues that President Trump was advised several state elections were fraudulent, the Select Committee points to numerous executive branch officials who publicly stated and privately stressed to President Trump226 that there was no evidence of fraud. By early January, more than sixty courts dismissed cases alleging fraud due to lack of standing or lack of evidence, noting that they made “strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” and that “there is no evidence to support accusations of voter fraud.” President Trump’s repeated pleas for Georgia Secretary of State Raffensperger clearly demonstrate that his justification was not to investigate fraud, but to win the election: “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.” Taken together, this evidence demonstrates that President Trump likely knew the electoral count plan had no factual justification.

The plan not only lacked factual basis but also legal justification. Dr. Eastman’s memo noted that the plan was “BOLD, Certainly.” The memo declared Dr. Eastman’s intent to step outside the bounds of normal legal practice: “we’re no longer playing by Queensbury Rules.” In addition, Vice President Pence “very consistent[ly]” made clear to President Trump that the plan was unlawful, refusing “many times” to unilaterally reject electors or return them to the states. In the meeting in the Oval Office two days before January 6, Vice President Pence stressed his “immediate instinct [] that there is no way that one person could be entrusted by the Framers to exercise that authority.”

Dr. Eastman argues that the plan was legally justified as it “was grounded on a good faith interpretation of the Constitution.” But “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” and believing the Electoral Count Act was unconstitutional did not give President Trump license to violate it. Disagreeing with the law entitled President Trump to seek a remedy in court, not to disrupt a constitutionally-mandated process. And President Trump knew how to pursue election claims in court—after filing and losing more than sixty suits, this plan was a last-ditch attempt to secure the Presidency by any means.

The illegality of the plan was obvious. Our nation was founded on the peaceful transition of power, epitomized by George Washington laying down his sword to make way for democratic elections. Ignoring this history, President Trump vigorously campaigned for the Vice President to single-handedly determine the results of the 2020 election. As Vice President Pence stated, “no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such authority.” Every American—and certainly the President of the United States—knows that in a democracy, leaders are elected, not installed. With a plan this “BOLD,” President Trump knowingly tried to subvert this fundamental principle.

Based on the evidence, the Court finds it more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.

The Court discussed above how the evidence shows that President Trump likely knew that the electoral count plan was illegal. President Trump continuing to push that plan despite being aware of its illegality constituted obstruction by “dishonest” means under § 371.

The evidence also demonstrates that Dr. Eastman likely knew that the plan was unlawful. Dr. Eastman heard from numerous mentors and like-minded colleagues that his plan had no basis in history or precedent. Fourth Circuit Judge Luttig, for whom Dr. Eastman clerked, publicly stated that the plan’s analysis was “incorrect at every turn.” Vice President Pence’s legal counsel spent hours refuting each part of the plan to Dr. Eastman, including noting there had never been a departure from the Electoral Count Act and that not “a single one of [the] Framers would agree with [his] position.”

Dr. Eastman himself repeatedly recognized that his plan had no legal support. In his discussion with the Vice President’s counsel, Dr. Eastman “acknowledged” the “100 percent consistent historical practice since the time of the Founding” that the Vice President did not have the authority to act as the memo proposed. More importantly, Dr. Eastman admitted more than once that “his proposal violate[d] several provisions of statutory law,” including explicitly characterizing the plan as “one more relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act.256 In addition, on January 5, Dr. Eastman conceded that the Supreme Court would unanimously reject his plan for the Vice President to reject electoral votes. Later that day, Dr. Eastman admitted that his “more palatable” idea to have the Vice President delay, rather than reject counting electors, rested on “the same basic legal theory” that he knew would not survive judicial scrutiny.

Dr. Eastman’s views on the Electoral Count Act are not, as he argues, a “good faith interpretation” of the law; they are a partisan distortion of the democratic process. His plan was driven not by preserving the Constitution, but by winning the 2020 election:

[Dr. Eastman] acknowledged that he didn’t think Kamala Harris should have that authority in 2024; he didn’t think Al Gore should have had it in 2000; and he acknowledged that no small government conservative should think that that was the case.

Dr. Eastman also understood the gravity of his plan for democracy—he acknowledged “[y]ou would just have the same party win continuously if [the] Vice President had the authority to just declare the winner of every State.”

The evidence shows that Dr. Eastman was aware that his plan violated the Electoral Count Act. Dr. Eastman likely acted deceitfully and dishonestly each time he pushed an outcome-driven plan that he knew was unsupported by the law. 

President Trump and Dr. Eastman participated in numerous overt acts in furtherance of their shared plan. As detailed at length above, President Trump’s acts to strong-arm Vice President Pence into following the plan included meeting with and calling the Vice President and berating him in a speech to thousands outside the Capitol.262 Dr. Eastman joined for one of those meetings, spent hours attempting to convince the Vice President’s counsel to support the plan, and gave his own speech at the Ellipse “demanding” the Vice President “stand up” and enact his plan.

Based on the evidence, the Court finds that it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021.

Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history. Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower—it was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.

More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability. This case cannot provide it. The Court is tasked only with deciding a dispute over a handful of emails. This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit. At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of “legal theories” gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.

 DATED: March 28, 2022

DAVID O. CARTER

UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE

And, Just Like That, Buster Is Back

Buster Keaton is like a comet that re-enters the Earth’s orbit every fifty years. He became international film star and director in the 1920s. In the 1970s, there was a Keaton revival that had critics arguing with each other about whether Keaton or Charlie Chaplin was the more brilliant filmmaker. Another half a century has now passed since those spirited debates, and Keaton suddenly seems to be everywhere again: a lengthy profile by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, not one but two new biographies, and a biopic of Buster in the works.

I first experienced Keaton during the second of his semicentennial resurrections, thanks to a screening of Steamboat Bill Jr. in a college film-studies class taught by Andrew Sarris, who was then the film critic for the Village Voice. Seeing Keaton’s 1928 classic was a revelation to me. It had been made in the movies’ relative infancy. It was a black-and-white film. It was silent. But it beat just about anything this movie junkie had ever seen in terms of comic acting, physical stunts, and cinematography.

Most startling of all to this neophyte was Keaton’s physical presence onscreen and how the movie was built around it. His sharply beautiful, axe-blade profile gave him the look of an arrowhead, which was perfect because that’s what he portrayed in his films—a human projectile. In Buster’s films, the arrow—in the form of a quest or labor—is launched in the first few minutes. He has to find a wife within seven days or he will lose his inheritance. He has to recapture a military locomotive. He has to make his long-lost father proud of him. He has to put together a pre-fabricated house. He has to find some stolen diamonds. The rest of the film is Keaton relentlessly hurling himself forward, against all obstacles, in pursuit of his goal.

The quest is transformative. Buster’s character is often introduced as an effete miltquetoast, but once launched by the bow of the premise, he is transformed into a stonefaced and determined man on a mission, a brilliant strategist, a master of engineering and physics, and a phenomenally gifted athlete. This metamorphosis feels genuine because it is—those are the qualities that defined the Joseph Frank Keaton, the real man.

Keaton’s parents were vaudevillians, and Buster was part of the act by the time he was a year old. The toddler Buster was funny because he was dressed and made up as a miniature replica of his father’s onstage character. By the time he grew into boyhood, Buster’s prodigious skills as an acrobat and a comedian were obvious to all, and Keaton’s father remade the act around his son. Buster became a mute, recalcitrant child who refuses to obey his father. Father attempts to discipline his child, all hell breaks loose, and the patriarch begins to literally hurl his son the full length of the stage into the scenery, the frightening velocity and distance of the toss due to a wooden handle Buster’s mother had sewn into the back of his stage outfit. (Buster was billed as “The Human Mop.”) Within a few years, Buster’s character was fighting back against parental tyranny. Audiences never forgot watching Buster’s father shaving himself in front of the footlights with a straight razor while, behind his back, his son is swinging a basketball tied to a string in ever-expanding circles, the leather orb inching closer and closer to the back of his father’s head with each revolution.

By the time Buster Keaton was a teenager, his father had begun to drink before shows and the stage act had begun to reflect a real-life conflict between the two. In 1917, nineteen-year-old Buster quit the act and went to New York to start a new vaudeville career as a solo performer. One afternoon a chance encounter with a friend on the street led to Keaton visiting a movie studio on West 48th Street where comedian Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was shooting one of the comedy shorts that had made him a national sensation. Keaton had a lifelong fascination with anything mechanical, and after the day’s shooting was over, he asked Arbuckle to explain the movie-making process by taking a camera apart and explaining how film was developed, cut, and spliced together.

Keaton was hooked, and he took a huge pay cut to quit Broadway and join Arbuckle’s team. A few months, later, when Roscoe graduated to making feature films, Keaton was given Arbuckle’s studio (which had been relocated to Los Angeles) and was signed by producer Joseph Schenk to produce a series of his own comedy shorts.

Keaton became one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of the early filmmakers because he respected his medium and his audience, because he immediately grasped its endless possibilities, and because he brought a spectacularly visual vision to it.

As he began to direct his own films, Keaton considered a comment Arbuckle had once made to him. “You must never forget,” Arbuckle had told him, “that the average mentality of a movie audience is twelve years.”

“I thought about that for a very long time,” said Keaton later. “For three months, in fact. Then I said to Roscoe, ‘I think you’d better forget the idea that the movie audience has a twelve-year-old mind. Anyone who believes that won’t be in pictures very long, in my opinion.’ I pointed out how rapidly pictures were improving technically. The studios were also offering better stories all the time, using superior equipment, getting more intelligent directors…’Every time anyone makes a good picture,’ I said, ‘people with adult minds will come to see it.”

Where others saw film as a new kind of theater experience or new kinds of manufactured sets, Keaton saw it as a door into the whole, real world. “On the stage,” Keaton once told an interviewer, “even one as immense as the New York Hippodrome stage, one could only show so much. The camera had no such limitations. The whole world was its stage. If you wanted cities, deserts, the Atlantic Ocean, Persia, or the Rocky Mountains for your scenery and background, you merely took your camera to them. In the theater you had to create an illusion of being on a ship, a railroad train, or an airplane. The camera allowed you to show your audience the real thing: real trains, horses and wagons, snowstorms, floods. Nothing you could stand on, feel, or see was beyond the range of the camera.”

 “Keaton lived in the camera,” said Arbuckle. Buster’s comedy was visual, images captured via long shots—no cheating cross-cuts or closeups for Keaton. The Playhouse, Keaton’s 1921 cinematic valentine vaudeville, just one extended visual gag. Buster is literally the entire show—the conductor and all the musicians in the pit band, the people in the audience, the stagehands, a dance team, even—in one of the most hilarious feats of animal mimicry ever filmed—a rogue chimpanzee. But the sequence that kept Keaton’s fellow movie professionals coming back again and again to see The Playhouse was one in which nine different Busters line up across the screen and perform a unison dance number in a minstrel show Nothing like it had ever been filmed. As one historian has explained, Keaton accomplished this startling scene by building “a light-proof box for the camera, its front comprised of nine equally spaced shutters that could be closed independently of one another, allowing for the exposure of nine different vertical slivers of the frame.” In 1921, all film cameras were hand-cranked, so to make Keaton’s illusion work, the cameraman had to hand crank a take featuring one of the nine Keatons, rewind the film back to the starting point, and film the next Keaton minstrel while cranking the camera at exactly the same speed—and do this nine times.

After starring in and directing eleven brilliant comedy shorts, Metro signed Keaton to develop his own feature films. Over the next five years, Keaton—serving as producer, star, scene planner, chief gag writer, and director—released eleven outstanding features in one of the great sustained periods of high-level creativity in the history of popular entertainment. Five of them—“Sherlock Jr.,” “The Navigator,” “The General,” “Steamboat Bill Jr.,” and “The Cameraman”—have been included in the National Film Registry, making Keaton one of the most honored filmmakers on that prestigious list.

In 1928, Keaton lost creative control of his films and became a victim of the new formulaic Hollywood studio system. He began to drink heavily. His marriage failed. Silent films were replaced by the talkies. 1932 found Buster reduced to playing second banana to Jimmy Durante in a pair of films. Three years later, Keaton was a patient in the psychopathic ward of the National Military Home in Los Angeles.

In 1940, Keaton married Eleanor Norris, a beautiful MGM contract dancer who was 23 years his junior. They remained together the rest of his life, and by all accounts Norris was the best thing that ever happened to him. Buster limited his drinking to an occasional beer and kept working. He directed and starred in a series of shorts for the small Educational Pictures company. He got back on MGM’s payroll as consultant on comedy films, including pictures by the Marx Brothers and Red Skelton. He started appearing in bit parts in films, including memorable cameos in Sunset Boulevard and Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight. He had a successful run in Paris as the star of the Cirque Medrano.

In 1948 Keaton visited his son Jim, whose home featured one of the first television sets. Keaton stared at the ten-inch screen, transfixed, for several hours. “That,” he told his son, “is the future of entertainment.” Keaton jumped into the new medium with both feet in the 1950s. He starred in his own series, The Buster Keaton Show, sponsored by Studebaker, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show several times.

As Buster launched a new career on the small screen, prominent film critics Walter Kerr and James Agee published essays lauding Keaton’s silent features and making the case that Keaton belonged among the very best American film directors. Many of Keaton’s films were presumed lost until 1956, when actor James Mason, who had bought the mansion Keaton had built in the 1920s, discovered a vault in a shed on the property that contained 35mm prints of five Keaton films. An energetic hustler named Raymond Rohauer began amassing a nearly complete collection of Keaton’s shorts and features, cleared up a snarl of copyright issues, and launched a partnership with Keaton to get his films shown again in theaters and museums.

In 1957, Paramount released a Keaton biopic starring Donald O’Connor. The film was a predictable mess, but Keaton used the money he made from it to purchase a rural, ranch-style home in Woodland Hills, California. He stayed busy. The Motion Picture Country House, to which many of the old Hollywood stars had retired, was only ten minutes from Keaton’s home. “I drive by sometimes and talk to some of the old timers,” Keaton once a reporter, “but it makes me so sad I don’t do it often. They live in the past. I don’t. One Easter Sunder I went to a party at Mary Pickford’s house. Everybody from silent films was there. I tried to have fun, but I discovered we had nothing to talk about. Some of them had never heard a Beatles record. They hadn’t kept up with the times.”

Keaton became a ubiquitous presence thanks to appearances in a slew of television commercials. He toured with dinner theater companies. He popped in several American International teen pictures, including Beach Blanket Bingo and How To Stuff A Wild Bikini, appeared on the television shows Candid Camera, Route 66 and The Twilight Zone, and contributed cameos to the movies It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Around the World in Eighty Days, and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.

The Nobel Prize winning novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett only visited the United States once, in 1965. What brought him to New York was the chance to make his own film (entitled, characteristically, Film) with Buster Keaton. Beckett had tried to recruit Keaton for the role of Lucky in the 1956 Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, but Keaton found the play incomprehensible and turned it down. Keaton was similarly bewildered by Film. “He hated every minute of it,” Eleanor Keaton recalled. “He did exactly what they told him to do and not one whit less or one whit more, because he didn’t know what he was doing.” Director Alan Schneider recalled that Keaton “was totally professional: patient, unperturbable, relaxed, easy to tell something to, helpful.”

If you’re not familiar with Keaton’s films, I recommend watching the short One Week and the feature Steamboat Bill, Jr. The premise of One Week—newlyweds are given a kit home as a gift and have to assemble it themselves—results in a nightmarish, surreal structure that spins like a top in a violent storm and ejects its occupants, and a rousing finale involving the first of Keaton’s many film locomotives. The General is regarded by many as Keaton’s classic, but in my opinion Steamboat Bill Jr. is a better introduction to the full spectrum of his genius. The film benefits from one of Keaton’s best plot lines (an effete man-child struggles to help his rugged, he-man father save his decrepit steamboat business), some of his best acting, and a relentless cavalcade of perfectly executed cinematic moments that range from subtle character revelations to jaw-dropping, what-did-I-just-see impossibilities. I know that this post is dripping with superlatives, but you could make a strong case that Buster Keaton was the greatest stuntman in the history of film, and some of his greatest physical feats and gymnastic pratfalls are immortalized within the frames of “Steamboat Bill Jr.”

James Curtis’ new “Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker’s Life is the most thorough and well-researched of the several Keaton biographies that have been published over the years.

Buster Keaton died in 1966. He had lived to see his films play once again to packed houses and standing ovations around the world. The Keaton arrow that had been launched on that Arbuckle movie set in 1917 had reached its target. Dead center. Bullseye.

The Endurance Found

The wreck of the ship Endurance, whose sinking launched one of the most astounding tales of survival in expeditionary history, has been found, after 107 years, in remarkable condition in 10,000 feet of ice-covered water in Weddell Sound in Antarctica. 

 Endurance was the ship of Sir Ernest Shackleton on his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (1914 – 1917). After the Norwegian Amundsen beat Scott’s British expedition in reaching the South Pole, Shackleton had decided to become the first to cross the continent of Antarctica. But Endurance became trapped in the sea ice during the winter of 1915. The twenty-eight men on the expedition team spent several months living on board the ship, but after the encroaching ice crushed its stern, Shackleton gave the orders to abandon it. 

Shackleton’s journal entry that days reads: “We have been compelled to abandon the ship, which is crushed beyond all hope of ever being righted, we are alive and well, and we have stores and equipment for the task that lies before us. The task is to reach land with all the members of the Expedition. It is hard to write what I feel.”

The 28 members of the expedition were isolated on the drifting pack ice hundreds of miles from land, with no ship, no means of communication with the outside world, and limited supplies. After salvaging three lifeboats from Endurance, the men camped on the drifting ice pack for two months before managing a harrowing, five-day sea voyage to reach land on Elephant Island. They were off the ice, but they were on an uninhabited island far off the shipping routes. The nearest human outpost was a whaling station on South Georgia Island, 720 nautical miles away. Shackleton and his men fortified the strongest lifeboat, only 20 feet long, and he and five others struck out for South Georgia. For fifteen days, during which they were only able to make four navigational readings, they battled storms, the ice, a hurricane, and the constant threat of capsizing before finally reaching South Georgia. But the small group had made land on the other side of the island from the whaling station. With only boots with screws pushed into the soles, a carpenter’s adze, and fifty feet of rope, Shackleton and his men hiked nonstop for 32 miles over a perilous mountain range covered by snow and ice. When the unrecognizable men walked into the whaling station, a startled Norwegian asked who they were. “I am Ernest Shackleton,” came the reply, and the Norwegian burst into tears.

The problem of rescuing his men back on Elephant Island was almost as challenging. Shackleton’s first three attempts failed due to ice. Finally, he convinced the Chilean government to lend him a tug, and the rescue party reached Elephant Island on the 30th of August. The men had been stranded there for four months. Every one of them survived. 

Shackleton wrote his own version of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition in his book “South,” and Alfred Lansing’s “Endurance” is a recent account, complete with remarkabl photos and stills from motion pictures taken during the expedition and rescued along with the survivors.  

A short film of the expedition, featuring the unforgettable motion pictures taken by the expedition, is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ-6RJkuLlQ

Check here for more on the final piece of Shackleton’s journey—the successful effort to find the wreck of the Endurance: https://endurance22.org/

Here At Home, The Rule of Law Asserts Itself

While the world was transfixed, with good reason, on the horrific invasion of Ukraine by the Russians, two events occurred here at home last Wednesday that were truly momentous if you hate fascism and believe in the rule of law.

The first was when Joshua James, a leader of the fascist Oath Keepers organization, pleaded GUILTY to sedition. James had been charged with multiple felonies of obstructing the formal count of the electoral college, assaulting a police officer inside the Capitol, and attempting to destroy records of his communication with other Oath Keepers. As part of his guilty plea, charges other than seditious conspiracy and obstruction were dropped.

James is admitting that he helped lead two tactically equipped teams that were sent into the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and organize the stockpiling of a cache of weapons in a hotel just outside of Washington, D.C. He also pleaded guilty to one count of obstructing an official proceeding, a felony that many of the January 6th insurrectionists have been charged with. Perhaps even more importantly, James agreed to cooperate with Federal investigators, who have charged ten others, including Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes, with sedition.

James’ guilty plea is the first successful prosecution of sedition in twenty years. Seditious conspiracy is defined in Federal law as when two or more people “conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States,” or act “by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” James’ indictment reveals that the Oath Keepers began planning for a “civil war” two days after the 2020 election. In the plea agreement, James agreed that Rhodes “instructed [him] and others to be prepared and called upon to … use lethal force if necessary” to keep Trump in office.

James’ guilty plea and Rhodes’ upcoming trial are just the start of an effort to destroy a leading fascist group allied with the White Supremacist QAnon Trump party.

The other event on Wednesday was a filing made by the House committee investigating the January 6th insurrection in response to a legal attempt by Trump campaign lawyer John Eastman to avoid turning over 10,000 emails to the committee. This is a civil case, but if you ever wanted to know—and if you like anything like democracy and the rule of law, you should—whether the committee’s work will culminate in a criminal referral against Donald Trump to the Department of Justice, you got your answer on Wednesday.

According to the committee:

“The evidence detailed above provides, at minimum, a good-faith basis for concluding that President Trump has violated section 18 U.S.C. § 1512(c)(2). The elements of the offense under 1512(c)(2) are: (1) the defendant obstructed, influenced or impeded, or attempted to obstruct, influence or impede, (2) an official proceeding of the United States, and (3) that the defendant did so corruptly.”

“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371. An individual “defrauds” the government for purposes of Section 371 if he “interfere[s] with or obstruct[s] one of its lawful governmental functions by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.”

“There is also evidence to support a good-faith, reasonable belief that in camera review of the materials may reveal that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in common law fraud in connection with their efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. The District of Columbia, where these events occurred, defines common law fraud as: (1) a false representation; (2) in reference to material fact; (3) made with knowledge of its falsity; (4) with the intent to deceive; and (5) action is taken in reliance upon the representation.”

The filing is an amazing read. (You can see the full text here: gov.uscourts.cacd.841840.160.0.pdf (courtlistener.com).) It lays out in great detail the evidence of the conspiracy led by Trump and his allies in government to overturn a free and fair election by convincing his followers that that election was fraudulent and by relentlessly pressuring government officials to buy into narratives that Trump knew were false.

The filing shows beyond a doubt that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were, in Attorney General Bill Barr’s word, “bullshit” because his own team was telling him that, including Trump’s own lawyers, who NEVER claimed fraud in court, Vice President Mike Pence, Attorney General William Barr, Department of Homeland Security head Ken Cuccinelli, senior Trump campaign aide Jason Miller, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger. Outside Trump’s own circle, he heard from the sixty judges (some of whom he had appointed) who ruled that his election challenges were baseless, the New York state bar association, which yanked Rudy Guiliani’s law license because he made “false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers, and the public” regarding the election, and the Michigan judge who sanctioned Trump attorneys Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and seven others for “deceiving a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated.”

The committee made it clear on Wednesday that it will send a criminal referral against Donald Trump, and many of his confederates, to the Justice Department before this fall’s elections.

The filing contains some remarkable windows into the chaos Trump created inside his administration as he insisted, without any proof, that the 2020 election was fraudulent, and about the actions of various governmental hacks and professional weasels who tried to grab power and influence in the middle of that chaos.

Take Jeffrey Clark. Clark is a Harvard grad who served as Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of George Bush’s Justice Department and was later appointed to that same position by Donald Trump. His long-time associate, Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, helped get Clark appointed to the Justice Department's Civil Division. After the 2020 election, Clark was the only senior official in the Department of Justice who backed Trump’s claims of fraud. Then Bill Barr resigned as Attorney General. The standard procedure was for Rosen, Barr’s top deputy, to become Acting Attorney General. Imagine Rosen’s surprise, then, when Clark invited him and Acting Assistant Attorney General Richard Donoghue to a meeting and informed them that he had been to the White House to report on “his own investigation” into the election and that Trump was about to announce that he, Clark, would be named Acting Attorney General.

Clark hadn’t counted on the threat of a full-scale mutiny.

Things came to a head in a meeting that Trump called on January 3 in the Oval Office to decide Rosen’s fate. In attendance were Trump, White House counsel Pat Cippolone, Clark, and Justice Department leaders Pat Philbin, Jeffrey Rosen, Steve Engel, and Richard Donoghue. Donoghue, a no-nonsense Brooklyn native and Army veteran who had spent weeks investigating specific conspiracy theories about the election and trying to convince Trump that they were totally unfounded, took the lead in drawing a line in the sand against Clark’s bizarre self-promotion.

As Donoghue relates in his deposition for the January 6th committee, “Jeff Clark certainly was advocating for change in leadership that would put him at the top of the Department, and everyone else in the room was advocating against that and talking about what a disaster this would be.”

“He repeatedly said to the President that, if he was put in the seat, he would conduct real investigations that would, in his view, uncover widespread fraud; he would send out the letter that he had drafted; and that this was a last opportunity to sort of set things straight with this defective election, and that he could do it, and he had the intelligence and the will and the desire to pursue these matters in the way that the President thought most appropriate.”

“I made the point that Jeff Clark is not even competent to serve as the Attorney General. He's never been a criminal attorney. He's never conducted a criminal investigation in his life. He's never been in front of a grand jury, much less a trial jury. And he kind of retorted by saying, ‘Well, I've done a lot of very complicated appeals and civil litigation, environmental litigation, and things like that.’ And I said, ‘That's right. You're an environmental lawyer. How about you go back to your office, and we'll call you when there's an oil spill.”

“I remember saying at some point that, you know, Jeff wouldn't even know how to find his way to Chris Wray's office, much less march in there and direct the FBI what to do, and that, ‘If you walked into Chris Wray's office, he wouldn't even know who you are. So we had these conversations that went around and around and were very blunt and direct.”

When asked by Trump how they would react if he installed Clark, each of the attorneys threatened to resign. Donoghue told Trump that “I wouldn’t serve one minute this guy.”

Trump then turned to Steve Engel, and asked him, “Steve, you wouldn’t resign, would you?”

“Steve Engel— I remember this because it was very vivid — said, ‘No, Mr. President,” Donoghue told the committee. “’If you replace Jeff Rosen with Jeff Clark and send this letter, I would have no choice. I would have to resign.’”

In a stunning comment considering that he was proposing to cause the resignations of the entire leadership of the Justice Department and his own White House counsel, Trump asked, “What have I got to lose I do this?”

Donoghue responded by saying “Mr. President, these aren't bureaucratic leftovers from another administration. You picked them. This is your leadership team. You sent every one of them to the Senate; you got them confirmed. What is that going to say about you, when we all walk out at the same time? ... And what happens if, within 48 hours, we have hundreds of resignations from your Justice Department because of your actions? What does that say about your leadership?”

Again, from Donoghue’s testimony: “He [Trump] did say several times, ‘You two,’ pointing at Mr. Rosen and me, ‘You two 24 haven't done anything. You two don't care. You haven't taken appropriate actions. Everyone tells me I should fire you," and things of that nature.”

At the end of the three-hour meeting, Trump reversed himself and decided not to replace Rosen. Pointing to Rosen, the President said, “I know that these two here, they're not going to do anything. They're not going to fix this. But that's the way it is, and I'm going to let it go anyway.”

It was the Justice Department lawyers who, with the exception of the ambitious Jeffrey Clark, against Trump’s claims of election fraud. If Trump ends up going on trial for his post-election crimes, it will be the Justice Department lawyers who send him there.

Washington, D.C.--The Burial Site of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Legacy

Today is Martin Luther King Day in America.

In 2013, Washington, D.C. became the home of the magnificent Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. This year it may become the burial site of his legacy.

When it comes to racism in our country, the progress we have made has not come primarily from a collective commitment to Martin Luther King’s vision of justice and equality. It’s come from our reaction to violence and murder.

Part of the national reaction to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln was the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, the Reconstruction Acts, and the Enforcement Act of 1870. The relentless lynchings of black people spawned the NAACP and led to the Supreme Court’s striking down segregated schools in its Brown v. Board of Education decision. The grisly murder of Emmitt Till gave momentum to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.  The public reaction to the bombing deatths of four black children in Birmingham, and the unearthing of the buried bodies of the James Cheney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, helped pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a national popular figure until after he was assassinated, but the gradual change in public opinion toward him led to his birthday being made a national holiday in 1983. The brutal torture and death of George Floyd in 2019 inspired demonstrations by millions of people around the world and resulted in the murder conviction of a white officer and a new focus on police brutality against minorities. The vigilante execution of Ahmad Arbery led to convictions and life sentences for his murderers.

All of these reactions to violence and murder led to positive results that undeniably represented real legal progress for African-Americans and put the country on the path to electing Barack Obama as President—twice. Some white Americans saw Obama’s election victories as proof that institutionalized racism in America was dead and buried. Right-wing radio host Lou Dobbs proclaimed that "We are now in a 21st-century post-partisan, post-racial society,” and liberal pundit Chris Matthews said of Obama, "He is post-racial by all appearances. You know, I forgot he was black tonight for an hour."

African Americans knew better. In a 2014 poll, half of white respondents said that they believed that the justice system treats Americans of all races equally, but only ten percent of blacks said the same. A 2015 Gallup poll found that 13% of black Americans surveyed identified race relations as the country’s most important problem. Only four percent of whites who took the survey agreed.

African Americans know our country’s racial history and how white Americans have worked strenuously since the founding of the first British colonies in North America to wipe out all trace of it. African Americans understand that every important stage of racial progress in American history has been followed by a political backlash that has reinforced white supremacy.

African Americans know all about the tenuous commitment of both national parties to racial progress. Just six years after Republican President Ulysses S. Grant declared that “the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life,” the Party of Lincoln saw Rutherford B. Hayes, its candidate in the 1876 election, lose the popular vote and fall just short of the required number of Electoral College vote. The Republicans decided that retaining national power was more important than supporting racial progress, and the Democratic Party decided that re-establishing white supremacy in the South was more important for the White House. The Democrats thereby allowed twenty Electoral College votes to be switched to Hayes in return for a commitment from Hayes to remove federal troops—and Reconstruction—from the South.

African Americans know all about how the Voting Rights Act was supported by both parties for forty years (Nixon, Ford, and Reagan both signed extensions of the Act), but they also understand how that legislation began the dramatically swift transition of white supremacist voters and politicians from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and how hard the Republican Party worked to make the South a Republican stronghold.

African Americans understand that the election of Barack Obama not only fulfilled a cherished dream but also unleashed a furious reaction from white American voters that led to the election of an avowed racist as President in 2015 and the complete and utter transition of the Republican Party into the White Supremacist QAnon Party.

African Americans understand that before Obama’s election an extension to the Voting Rights Act, an act that had passed the Senate 98-0 and the House 390-33, and was signed into law by Republican President George W. Bush. They don’t need to be reminded how the reconstituted conservative Supreme Court rescinded the enforcement mechanisms in the Voting Rights Act in 2003, or that not a single Republican senator supports voting-rights legislation.

Black voters responded to Trump by saving the Democratic Party’s from extinction in the 2020 election and buy awarding them with a surprise Senate majority in 2022. They expect Biden and the party to put action behind its stated support of voting rights.

They haven’t gotten that action. What they’ve gotten instead is a year squandered in dead-end negotiations within the Democratic caucus and a party that can’t pass voting rights despite controlling the Presidency and both houses of Congress.

When Joe Biden came to Georgia last week to deliver a major speech (but no legislation) on voting rights, black Georgians prominent in the long fight over voting, including Stacey Abrams, did not show up. "We don't need even more photo ops," Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told reporters. "We need action.” Returning to Washington, D.C. after the speech, Biden paid a visit to Mitch McConnell’s office to apologize for telling the truth when he linked the White Supremacist QAnon Party to the segregationists of the past.

African Americans know where the bodies of their historical supporters are buried. They can also see that one political party is busy digging a grave for voting rights and democracy in this country and that the other party is powerless to stop it.

9/11/01 Was A High-Water Mark For American Heroism and Unity. On 9/12/01, We Began Greasing the Skids for Another Terrorist Attack.

I was in Seattle on the morning of September 11, 2001, getting ready to go to work at my job at Microsoft. I grabbed some coffee, turned on the television, and found myself struggling to instantly process the unbelievable news that a plane had struck the World Trade Center in New York City. Then I watched in disbelief as a second plane hit the other tower--this must be an attack. And then the towers collapsed. I had lived in New York City through college and a couple of years beyond. (I was living there when Philip Petit, who I had seen often in my neighborhood doing juggling tricks on his unicycle, walked a wire between the twin towers.) Watching the compounding horrors on CNN, I became a New Yorker again, and it was my city under attack. I thought of my many friends who still lived or worked in Manhattan, and it struck me that they would already have been at their jobs. My friend Bob worked in a nine-story building right at the foot of the towers. I called his wife. She had just gotten a call from him. He had just turned on his work computer when the first tower was struck. He felt the concussion, swiveled his chair toward the window, and saw the tail section of an airplane drop past it. He hit the stairwell, burst out onto the street, and joined a crowd of people headed north, away from the towers. He told me later that people were scared but not running, just walking away purposefully and quietly. Then the second plane hit, and it was bedlam, with everyone running for their lives. He managed to hail a cab, which drive him all the way to his home in the suburbs. Other friends who lived or worked nearby had other nightmarish stories—being covered in ash, seeing the arrival of the first responders and watching them run TOWARD the buildings before they collapsed.

I drove to work. My Microsoft division was holding an all-hands meeting that day. Our vice president was in a huddle near the entrance of a huge conference hall with his leadership team. At first, he was adamant that the meeting take place as scheduled. Otherwise, the terrorists win, he argued forcefully. But it didn’t take much more conversation to convince him of the obvious—that no meaningful work could possibly be done that day, and we were dismissed.

It’s true that we were united as a country that day. We had been attacked. This was my generation’s Pearl Harbor. I was impressed by the initial response of both President Bush and Mayor Guiliani, two politicians who I had absolutely nothing in common with until 9/11. The heroism of the people in the towers and at the Pentagon, the first responders, the people on Flight 93, and the thousands of men and women who enlisted—that is the collective remembrance that must be burned forever into all of our American brains. It was phenomenal. There are no words.

It’s almost as difficult to find words to describe what has happened to our country since September 11, 2001. What would my reaction have been if on September 12 of that year it would have been revealed to me would happen between then and now—how we would go off the rails as a country? That we would invade and occupy Afghanistan to capture Bin Laden, only to allow him to escape, and stay there for twenty years. That the Republican President, Vice President, Defense Secretary, Secretary of State, and most Democratic Party leaders would purposely collude in the concoction of A Monstrously Big Lie justifying the invasion of another country—Iraq, which has absolutely nothing to do with 9/11--under false pretenses. A dark day in American history if there ever was one.  That our “war on terror” would last twenty years, kill nearly 10,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans, and cost us $6 trillion. That 9/11 would spawn the first totally baseless, Internet-driven, “don’t believe what you saw with your own eyes” Monstrously Big Lie, the 9/11 Truther Movement, that would set the template for a tsunami of hysterical and completely bogus online disinformation campaigns that, with the enthusiastic assistance of the country’s largest “news” network, would eventually be accepted as a the “real reality” by nearly a third of Americans. That America would be run for eight years by the first African-American President (who would finally kill Bin-Laden), but that his successor would be a proud racist and fascist who looked approvingly on right-wing, domestic terrorism and whose response to his failed re-election campaign would be to incite a crowd to attack the U.S. Capitol and to concoct another Monstrously Big Lie, this one designed to destroy our faith in our system of free and fair elections. That Americans, who had pulled together to eradicate many deadly diseases in the previous century, would allow a global pandemic to get the best of us because nearly a quarter of us wouldn’t get vaccinated because they embraced a bogus, politically driven, science-phobic alternate reality.

Twenty years after the unity of 9/11/01, we’re under attack by terrorists again. This time, our response must be better than the misguided and dangerous steps we’ve taken since those planes were flown into the twin towers. Because this time the terrorists are us.

Memo To The Unvaccinated: We're Taking Our Country Back

Here’s a message to the unvaccinated in the United States from the vast majority of your fellow citizens (75%) who have had at least one shot:

We’re taking our country back. We’re not a nation typified by right-wing politics, death cults, misinformation, disruption of public meetings, physical threats, and a war on science. We want the Department of Justice to commit appropriate resources to fight the dangerous and deadly efforts of state governors to ban mask and vaccination mandates. We have rights, too, and we’re going to finally start acting like the majority. Enough is enough.

We’re going to save the economy and jobs. This country will never prosper in the face of endless mutations and waves of infections. We support Biden’s new rules that all federal employees be vaccinated, and that all private employers with 100 or more employees mandate vaccines or weekly testing and give employees time off with pay to get vaccinated. Our numbers include many business leaders, like the CEOs of many large companies, including Amtrak, Anthem, BlackRock, Cisco, Citigroup, CVS Health, Deloitte, Delta Air Lines, DoorDash, Equinox, Facebook, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Google, Jefferies, Lyft, McDonald’s, MGM Resorts International, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, NBCUniversal, Netflix, Saks, Salesforce, TJX, Twitter, Tyson Foods, Uber, United Airlines, ViacomCBS, Walgreens, Walt Disney, and Walmart, who have already announced vaccination mandates for their employees.

We’re going to save our medical system. It is is being overwhelmed and bankrupted by unvaccinated Covid patients. Two states are currently rationing medical care. The average cost of hospital treatment for Covid is $20,000. In June and July 2021 alone, COVID-19 hospitalizations among unvaccinated adults cost the U.S. health system over $2 billion. We’re going to get our booster shots as they become available.

We’re going to protect our healthcare workers. These selfless front-line heroes have been constantly exposed to a deadly virus for nearly two years. They are reporting high levels of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Seventy-five percent of health workers report an overall feeling of exhaustion and burnout. Thirty percent are considering leaving the profession. We support Biden’s mandate that healthcare workers working in facilities that receive Medicare of Medicaid reimbursement be vaccinated.

We’re going to protect our children. Child hospitalization rates have increased five times due to the Delta variant. 750,000 children tested positive between August 4 and September 2. We are going to vaccinate our children as soon as the health experts give us the green light to do so.

We’re going to get back to in-person schooling. We support vaccination as a requirement to attend public schools and universities. The Los Angeles school system just took this step yesterday for students 12 and older. We are going to stop this endless cycle of opening schools, then having to quarantine infected students and teachers, and then having to revert back to online learning.

We’re going to make public transportation safe. We support Biden’s decision to double fines for people who won’t abide by federal mask mandates for travel. We want stiffer penalties and jail terms for anti-vaxxers who act violently and disruptively while traveling.

We’re going to make entertainment safe. We support proof of vaccination for attendance at sports events, movie theaters, and music venues.

Heads up, unvaccinated folks: Your lunatic death cult hit its high-water mark two days ago. Now you’re going to learn that the majority has rights, too.

Deal with it.

Ever Wonder Why the White Supremacist Party has turned against democracy? It's the census, stupid.

Want to know why the White Supremacist QAnon Party is working feverishly to suppress the vote, convince its base that elections are fraudulent, and practice how to overturn future elections?

It’s the census, stupid.

The White Supremacist QAnon Party is an openly racist and politically regressive organization that is overwhelmingly (89%) white. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 was the reaction of white America to the election of Barack Obama. There is solid data that fear of white displacement was the most common link across Trump voters.

Just look at the White Supremacist QAnon Party’s version of reality:

• Obama was born in Africa.

• Mexicans are rapists and criminals.

• The coronavirus was inflicted upon us by the Chinese.

• The massive Black Lives Matter protests were violent riots.

• Seattle and Portland, Oregon are Violent Anarchy Zones.

• Immigrants are responsible for the Delta variant surge.

• The Democratic “Squad” in Congress (all women of color) are communists.

• The Democrats are purposefully flooding the country with non-white people from shithold countries. Tucker Carlson, the spokesman for the party, claims that the Democrats want more immigrants because they view them as “more obedient voters from the Third World,” and that “in order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country” because they have been unable to gain the support of “real Americans.”

• Derek Chauvin was convicxted, according to Carlson, because his jury was intimidated: “If they continue to happen, decent, product [read: white] people will leave. The country as we know it will be over. So we must stop this current insanity. It’s an attack on civilization [read: white civilization].”

• There is no way the White Supremacist QAnon Party can lose a legitimate election.

• White votes are more valid than non-white votes. As a White Supremacist QAnon Party member of Arizona house put it, “Everybody shouldn’t be voting. Not everybody wants to vote, and if someone is uninterested in voting, that probably means that they’re totally uninformed on the issued. Quantity is important, but we have to look at the quality [read” whiteness] of votes, as well.”

Conversely, look at the 2020 vote through the racial lens. Biden won only 42% of the white vote, but he won by 8 million votes nationwide because he captured 90% of black voters, 63% of Asians, and 59% of Hispanics.

Another big event that happened in 2020 was the U.S. census, and today the government released a summary of the data. It’s really bad news for the White Supremacist QAnon Party:

• For the first time since first census, taken in 1790, the absolute number of white Americans SHRUNK—from 223.6 mlllion in 2010 to 204.3 million.

• The non-Hispanic white population declined by 2.6% in the last decade. White people now account for 58% of our population. They were 69% of the population ten years ago.

• The African-American population grew 5.6 percent since 2010.

• The Hispanic population grew by 23% over the last ten years. That’s a huge increase in only a decade.

• The Asian population grew by 35% in the last decade. You read that right: 38%--a massive shift.

• Thirty-six percent of American adults are non-white, a 25% increase in the past ten years.

• Forty-seven percent of American children are non-white, a 35% increase.

• The country is becoming more urban. Population growth was most pronounced in larger counties. As a group, small counties lost population.

A political party that had an actual political program and wanted to see it implemented would respond to these data by expanding the diversity of its base and thereby ensuring its future within our democratic framework.

A political party that is a cult devoted to a single racist leader and that has no platform other than white supremacy would respond to these data by doubling down on authoritarianism, intimidating and delegitimizing people of color, rejecting the rule of law, suppressing the vote, and stealing elections.

Buckle up, everyone.

This Is Why I Vote for Democrats

This is why, despite how much they sometimes infuriate me, I vote for Democrats.

A prominent Democratic governor, the most powerful man in one of the most powerful states, is accused of sexual harassment.

He turns to his state’s attorney general, also a Democrat, and tasks her with conducting an independent investigation.

That attorney general hires outside counsel to conduct an independent investigation.

Four months later, that attorney general releases the findings of that investigation, which confirm that the governor sexually harassed members of his staff, retaliated against at least one accuser, and fostered a toxic work environment in his office.

The New York State attorney general has yet to decide whether Cuomo will face criminal charges, but that this point things have been handled EXACTLY the way all such incidents should be handled.

Victims came forward. The press investigated. Voters expressed concern. Enormous pressure was put on Cuomo.

Cuomo denied the allegations, but, in the end, he recognized the their seriousness and empowered an independent investigation of himself rather than completely stonewall the allegations.

The Democratic New York state attorney general did not whitewash the allegations. Instead, she launched a legitimate investigation, hiring investigators outside of her office to ensure that investigation’s independence.

The independent investigation was not a cover up. It lasted four months and was thorough. One hundred and seventy-nine people were interviewed, including Cuomo and eleven women who claimed he harassed them. Tens of thousands of documents were analyzed. The investigation reached a set of findings.

Those findings were not covered up or locked away in a vault so that the public would never see them. Instead, the investigators publicly released a 165-page report dealing with each allegation in detail and giving substantial evidence for its findings and announced their findings in a public news conference.

This drama is not over. We don’t know at this point what personal price Cuomo will end up paying for his odious behavior. He is refusing to resign as of this moment, but most likely he will end up doing so, perhaps in exchange for not being indicted.

But the Democrats in New York State took the charges seriously, investigated them thoroughly and in a timely fashion, found that their party leader committed illegal acts, and told the public about it.

The comparison with the utter corruption of the White Supremacist QAnon Party—led by a criminal, consisting only of his lackeys, and dedicated not to the rule of law but to a world in which racists, fascists, victim shamers, liars, sexual harassers and wife beaters, con men, tax cheats, and violent extremists rule—could not possibly be more stark.

“Why do we Democrats always eat our own?” some will wail. Perhaps because the party, unlike the other guys, not only talks the talk when it comes to governmental integrity, personal responsibility, and the notion that no man is above the law, but also occasionally walks the walk.

Enough is Enough. We Need To Stop These Anti-Vaccination Death-Cult Motherfuckers. Now.

If the ultraTrumpian governor of Alabama can speak the truth about our country’s surrender to a virus, what is holding the rest of us back?

"It's time to start blaming the unvaccinated folks, not the vaccinated folks.”

I would put it slightly differently. Blaming the unvaccinated is easy. It’s time to start DEALING with the them.

Us “vaccinated folks” spent a year and a half doing the thing. We turned our lives upside down, and we didn’t complain about it or claim that we were morally superior. We isolated ourselves from family and friends. We figured out how to work from home. We educated our children about what was happening, helped them through months of no playmates, and figured out how to help them learn in front of the computer. We were robbed of any and all gatherings—the fabric of our lives and society itself. No funerals. No weddings. No proms or graduation ceremonies. We did everything we could to keep our loved ones, our friends, and our fellow citizens safe. We followed the advice of medical, scientific, and public-health experts. We waited patiently for our turn to get vaccinated and did so as soon as we could. We watched as the number of new infections and deaths dropped as the vaccination rates rose this spring. We rejoiced as our states and towns began to open up early this summer. We had joyful reunions with our families and friends who had likewise sacrificed and done the right thing. Most thrilling of all, we allowed ourselves to imagine a time this fall when the country would have passed the 70% vaccination threshold, the economy would be growing again, bars and restaurants and music venues would have reopened, our children would be back at school with their friends and teachers, and we would be able to gather with our fellow human beings again.

We were fooling ourselves.

Today anyone in the United States can be vaccinated whenever they want to be, but only 49% of Americans are fully vaccinated. Most experts believe that our country won’t be on the road to eradicating the coronavirus until 70% of us are vaccinated. The Delta variant is driving a wave of new infections and deaths. Cities like Los Angeles are re-masking again. Just this week in my own Facebook circle, eight people who were vaccinated have tested positive for the virus. This is insanity.

Unvaccinated Americans are willingly transforming parts of our country into science-free zones in which people will once again die needlessly and in which the coronavirus is provided with an unprotected population it can use to mutate into one viral variant after another, each more deadly than the last, until it finally creates one that is immune to all vaccines and we have to start over.

The governor of Mississippi is right. We have only ourselves to blame. Our scientists developed a remarkably safe and effective vaccine--in record time. Our government handed it us. So far, half of us have willfully rejected an opportunity to end a plague that has killed over 600,000 of our fellow Americans and to get back to our normal lives.

It’s hard enough to try to process this colossal American failure, but when you peel back the layers of the anti-vaxxer onion, it’s impossible not to wonder if these are the end times for the America that valued education, attracted scientists from all over the world, and worked collectively to eradicate earlier pandemics and diseases. If you look at the beliefs that the anti-vaxxers use to explain their inaction, none are legitimate, regardless of how passionately they are held.

Some anti-vaxxers are physical cowards—people who are afraid to have a needle pierce their skin.

Some anti-vaxxers are intellectually or socially isolated people who don’t even understand that there is a pandemic.

Some anti-vaxxers are “fuck science” people. These are the folks who are so intellectually insecure that their knee-jerk reaction to science is to be suspicious of it or reject it out of hand. Ignorant of the role science has played in the development of all the things they take for granted in their lives, science has, for them, become the enemy, a symbol for all the preachy know-it-alls who threaten and irritate them. These folks will never be convinced by an argument grounded in science. They take pride in getting their marching orders not from peer-reviewed science but from completely bogus YouTube videos made by others like them.

Some anti-vaxxers are otherwise informed citizens who are a deluded fringe element of the laudable, science-driven mass movement that began in the 1960s that exposed the toxicity of American life—the poisons in our food, in our air, in our dirt, in our solvents and weed killers, and in our water, and how those toxins find their way into the bodies of ourselves and our children. The anti-vaxxers who have spun out of this movement ignore data showing that vaccines are safe and effective for the general population and are fearful of all vaccines because of the ingredients that go into them and because some individuals experience side effects from any vaccines. These are the lifestyle ecologists who can’t see the forest for the trees—the folks who used to be driven by science but who now insist that vaccines cause autism, despite the mountain of scientific evidence to the contrary.

Some anti-vaxxers believe that the government is not only the problem, but an active force for evil from which we must be saved, either through the efforts of a strongman savior or via a mass insurrection. These are the folks who believe that the vaccine is a vehicle for the implantation of microchips, that the coronavirus is a weapon developed and used against us by the Chinese, and that vaccination is just the first step in a master plan by the government to create a population of willing sheep. (Not all of these people are insane conspiracy theorists. Most of us may not know about the long history of African Americans being used for medical experiments by our government, but the African American community knows about it, and some refer to it when they explain their resistance to vaccination.)

Some anti-vaxxers excuse their opposition on religious grounds. This is the truly frightening tribe that thinks of God as the sole owner of life and death decisions and not as a being who gave us brains so that we could take some of that load off of His shoulders.

Some anti-vaxxers are the Trumpers who hate everything that involves a Democrat. Everything, These are the folks who revere Trump for developing a vaccine so quickly (as if he did that work himself) but who refuse to take it now that a Democrat is in the White House.

These, then, are the people who stand between us and a normal life and a better economy. What are we going to do about these them?

“Nothing” is not acceptable. “Reason with them” ignores the reality of who these people are. “Force them” is a solution our government has never attempted, one that wouldn’t work, and one that would clearly lead to violence. And we don’t need every American vaccinated—just another twenty percent of us.

The answer lies in a reality that surfaced recently in focus groups run this month by right-wing political pollster Frank Luntz. Most of the unvaccinated people in this country identify as Republicans, and Luntz has been helping the Biden administration understand how Republicans feel about the vaccine. Luntz learned that what once was Republican hesitancy about vaccination has hardened into opposition, and that Republicans are now beyond persuasion. But those same Republican voters told Luntz that, while they were adamantly opposed to the vaccine, they would get vaccinated if that was the only way they could fly on an airplane, attend school, or go to a sporting event or a concert.

There’s your solution, America. It’s a hell of a lot simpler than developing a vaccine or isolating at home for fifteen months. You don’t want to be vaccinated? Fine, you don’t have to. That’s your right. You can have your death cult. But by refusing to do so you forfeit public travel, education, and entertainment. We would get that additional twenty percent vaccinated within a month if we took these steps.

We’re Americans. Are we really going to sacrifice our health, our society, our money, and our country to these anti-vaxx motherfuckers? Get loud and clear about how you feel about the prospect of the coronavirus getting a new lease on life after all you’ve sacrificed. Petition your government, your schools, and your travel companies to ban these death cultists until the pandemic is over. Enough is enough.

We Destroyed the American Dream So We Wouldn't Have To Share It

I was born in 1951. My childhood coincided with the most prosperous time in history for the American middle class. Harry Truman was President. He had replaced FDR, the insanely popular socialistic President. Our fathers came back from the war and used the socialistic GI Bill to go to college for free or to get low-interest loans to start businesses under the G.I. bill. The corporate tax rate was a socialistic 50.8% in 1951, and the economy grew 7.5% that year. Truman was succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower, who ran on a platform that advocated civil rights, equal pay for women, free education, and collective bargaining. Ike was no FDR, but he built a socialistic national highway system, refused to raise taxes and raise defense spending, ended the Korean War, and warned us against the military industrial complex.

For the first twenty years of my life, America was booming, and the economic explosion favored—get this—the middle and lower classes. Between 1950 and 1960, the poorest fifth of all households saw the largest growth in median income. The richest 5% experienced the slowest growth. This was trickle up economics.

One out of three workers in America belonged to a union during the 1950s. The median household income in 1955 was $4,37. The average house cost $9,100—about twice the annual income. If you had a high-school education and could score a union manufacturing job, uou could buy a nice home and a car and support a family on a single paycheck. Yankee Doodle socialism had taken hold. Studies conducted in 1956 found that 65% of Americans believed that the government ought to guarantee a job to anyone who wanted one and to provide a minimum standard of living in the country.

Then, in the 1960s, everything began to go terribly wrong. So wrong that now, sixty years later, the richest 1 percent of Americans own as much wealth as the entire middle class.

So what the fuck happened in the 1960s?

Racism, according to Heather McGhee, the author of the compelling new book “The Sum of Us.”

We think of economics as a highly complex science. We study macroeconomics and analyze microeconomics. We track manufacturing, trade balances and employment. We debate monetary policy and the influence of technology. Given the multitude of financial factors, McGhee’s notion that the past seventy years of American economics has been driven by a single social problem—one that is almost never even mentioned in economic discussions—seems insanely simplistic and naïve.

It’s not. “The Sum of Us” makes a compelling case for racism being the cause of the death of the American middle class, and then goes further and proves that this demise was a suicide and not a murder. For me, the book definitively answered a multitude of questions I have been asking myself for decades. It was also a lesson in humility, because those answers should have been brain-dead obvious to me all along.

The first sentence of McGee’s book is the biggest of those questions: “Why can’t we have nice things?”

Her answer is “because then black people would have nice things, too.”

When I was born, 90% of my fellow Americans were white, and McGhee shows how black Americans were frozen out of much of the socialistic programs that were vastly expanding the middle class. As she notes, “The New Deal era of the early 1930s—a period of tremendous expansion of government action to help Americans achieve financial security—was also a period in which the federal government cemented residential segregation through both practice and regulation.” Redlining kept black segregated, and home loans favored purchases in white neighborhood. McGhee quotes a typical assessment by the government’s Home Owner’s Loan Corporation: “The neighborhood is graded D because of its concentration of negroes, but the section may improve to a third class area as this element is forced out.” During the 1950s, fewer than 2% of African Americans were able to get a home loan from the Veterans Administration or the Federal Housing Authority. Most black Americans were not covered by the new minimum wage and overtime laws.

In the 1950s, African Americans began using the courts to fight for their fair share. Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955. Two years later, the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ordered the desegregation of public schools. That same year, President Eisenhower sponsored the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. The bill was watered down by Southern Democrats in Congress, but the act Eisenhower signed established the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department and empowered federal prosecutors to obtain court injunctions against interference with the right to vote, and a federal Civil Rights Commission with authority to investigate discriminatory conditions and recommend corrective measures. In 1964, Congress passed the landmark Civil Rights Act, which not only outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin but prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination.

These, then were the dramatic events that should have expanded the economic boom but instead brought it to a screeching halt—at least for most Americans. The changes that explain that chart.

Whites, especially in rural areas and in the South, responded not by embracing the right of African Americans to share in the American boom, but by declaring war on it. White America adopted what McGhee calls a “zero-sum hierarchy” that holds that when black Americans win, white Americans lose. That is what changed in the 1950s and ‘60s. It was the ascendancy of this suicidal mindset that ended America’s support of socialistic programs and started the long record of white America voting repeatedly against its own economic self interest.

The central metaphor in McGhee’s book is the public swimming pool. Between the start of the twentieth century and the onset of World War II, the public swimming pool was a symbol of civic pride. More than two thousand public swimming pools, some big enough to hold thousands, were constructed. Then, in 1958, a federal court ordered the desegregation of the zoo, the city parks, community center, and the swimming pool run by Montgomery, Alabama’s Parks Department. The city responded by dismantling the Parks Department. It closed every single public park and padlocked the doors of the community center. The zoo was shut down and the animals sold off, and the grand public pool was filled with cement.

Of course, these actions hurt the white citizens of Montgomery, too. “The Sum of Us” musters countless examples and statistics to show how racism has boomeranged on the white Americans who have worked so hard to institutionalize it. Once the courts held that social programs must be open to black Americans, white America turned against them, even though those programs benefited far more whites than blacks. Such programs were now defined racially. Ronald Reagan, a former FDR Democrat, criss-crossed the country telling stories of the black welfare queens who drove their Cadillacs to the supermarket to purchase vodka with food stamps.

This racialization, inspired by civil rights laws, quickly defined everything that had contributed to the growth of the white middle class.

Black voting had to be suppressed. In the 1950s and 1960s, Southern states adopted poll taxes, literacy tests, and other means to suppress the black vote. Those tactics worked, but the numbers of white voters plummeted as well. McGhee shares the stunning statistic that in the presidential election of 1944, when national turnout averaged 69 percent, the states that had poll taxes managed a scant 18% turnout—of both black and white voters. The only states that allow people with felony convictions to vote while they’re in prison are Maine and Vermont, the two whitest states in the nation.

White workers began to abandon unions. As one white union member puts it, “The unions are for putting people on equal ground. Some people see that as a threat to their society. The view is, even without a union white people are in charge. I’m in charge.”

Healthcare was racialized. It is no accident that the right wing quickly named the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare.” “This is a civil rights bill, this is reparations, whatever you want to call it,” railed Rush Limbaugh. Over a dozen red states have refused to expand Medicaid to its citizens, and most of those are white. Red states have been systematically closing rural hospitals instead of investing in healthcare. Texas has half the number of hospitals that it had in the 1960s despite a population increase of more than 15 million people.

White enrollment in private school spiked and whites began reducing funding for public schools, even though this hurt white children whose parents couldn’t afford private-school tuition. Today, eight of the ten states with the lowest funding for public education—Idaho, Utah, Texas, Tennessee, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Oklahoma—are controlled by the White Supremacist QAnon Party.

 “Everything we believe comes from the stories that we’ve been told,” McGhee reminds us. The curriculum had to be racialized, too. Racism has also denied white Americans our real history. A 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center report examined the curriculum standards in fifteen states and found that “none addresses how the ideology of white supremacy rose to justify the institution of slavery; most fail to lay out meaningful requirements for learning about slavery…or about how enslaved people’s labor was essential to the American economy.” Only 8 percent of high school students surveyed by the SPLC across the country knew that slavery was a primary cause of the Civil War. Seventy-eight percent could not explain how slaveholders benefited from provisions in the Constitution.

The problematic history of white America has not only been suppressed, it has been cruelly and purposefully inverted in truly monstrous fashion. McGhee quotes this statement by Abraham Lateiner,  a white class activist: “Because white men have raped Black and Brown women with impunity for centuries, race comforts us with the lie that it’s Black masculinity that is defined by hypersexual predation. Because white people penned Black people in the ‘ghetto’ via redlining, race tells us that this ‘ghetto’ is an indictment of Black pathology. People of color weren’t the ones who created whiteness or violated my spirit with it. That was my own people. That is my peers. That is me, too.”

Support of the role of government has collapsed among white Americans over the past fifty years, and this in turn has led to falling support for taxes, a brain drain from the public sector, and a failure to add to (or even steward) the infrastructure investments of the early twentieth century. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Every new legal victory by African Americans increased the pathological sense of victimhood amongst whites. Today, white people are by far the whiniest and most paranoid American demographic. The majority of white moderates (53%) and white conservatives (69%) believe that African Americans take more than they give to society. Three out of four White Supremacist QAnon Party voters agree with the statement “It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout,” and 40% of that “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.”

“The Sum of Us” reminds us that all this hard work to institutionalize racism has made whites the most segregated people in America. “Few people today understand the extent to which governments at every level forced Americans to live apart throughout our history.” McGhee writes. “Only Apartheid South Africa and Nazi German have segregated as well as the United States has, with precision and under the cover of law.” In a survey taken during the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown an unarmed Black teenager, the majority of white Americans said they regularly came into contact with only “a few” African Americans, and a 2019 poll reported that 21 percent “seldom or never” interacted with any people of color at all.

White America has denied itself the humanizing freedom that comes from racial understanding. As Robin DiAngelo says in the book, “It’s actually liberating and transformative to start from the premise that of course I’m thoroughly conditioned into racism. And then I can stop defending, denying, explaining, minimizing and get to work actually applying what I profess to believe with the practice of my life.”

Heather McGhee ran the liberal Demos think tank before taking time off to write this book and one of the most compelling aspects of “The Sum of Us” is how well she documents how much racism has cost the American economy. “Wealth is where history shows up in your wallet,” she writes, “where you financial freedom is determined by compounding interest on decisions made long before you were born.” According to a 2020 Citigroup report, not closing racial gaps for black twenty years ago has cost the U.S. GDP $16 trillion dollars.

I personally don’t believe that white America will ever willingly own up to its racism (we have proved that over and over and over again), and that real progress will only be made when whites are such a minority of the population that even the Electoral College, the Senate, and voter suppression will no longer be enough keep us in power. It saddens me that I probably won’t live to see that day.

McGhee is still optimistic. She points out how immigrants have made up nearly 85% of the population growth in rural America since 2010. (Lewiston, Maine, rebounded economically after an influx of Somali immigrants.) Several red states have voted to expand Medicaid despite rabid opposition from the White Supremacist QAnon Party. McGhee argues that there is a growing awareness that the racist zero-sum economic model has nothing more to offer and that there is a growing awareness that diversity is our greatest economic asset and that, thereby, the races truly do need each other. (She calls this the “solidarity dividence.”) McGhee understands that whites and people of color have to get on the same page before we can come out of our seventy-year tailspin, and she believes that a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation (TRHT) movement could play a huge role in bringing this about.

I truly hope that she is right.

The Day the Republican Party Shook Hands With the Devil

I was thirteen years old on July 14, 1964, when I sat in the living room with my parents and watched the beginning of the long, painful death of the Republican Party.

We were watching a live broadcast of the 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco. For months New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater had fought to become the party’s nominee. Rockefeller was a pro-civil-rights star from the party’s traditional Northeastern wing. (When Martin Luther King was stabbed, Rockefeller quietly paid for his hospital bill.) Goldwater was the fiery leader of a starkly different, ultraconservative movement based in the West and South. He had voted against the Civil Rights Act and openly accepted the support of racist, extreme right-wing, conspiracy-driven groups like the John Birch Society.

During the campaign, Rockefeller predicted what would happen to his party if Goldwater were to win the nomination. Goldwater, Rockefeller said, was pursuing “a program based on racism and sectionalism.”

After a close race, Goldwater narrowly beat Rockefeller in the California primary and effectively clinched the nomination. When an aide called on Rockefeller to summon the power of the Eastern Establishment, Rockefeller told him, “You are looking at it, buddy. I am all that is left."

At the party convention at the Cow Palace, Rockefeller was given five minutes to address the delegates in defense of five amendments to the party platform that had been submitted by the moderate wing to counter the extremist Goldwater platform.

Rockefeller let the Goldwater delegates have it. Standing underneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, Rockefeller told the furious Goldwater delegates that “There is no place in this Republican party for such hawkers of hate, such purveyors of prejudice, such fabricators of fear. There is no place in this Republican party for those who would infiltrate its ranks, distort its aims, and convert it into a cloak of apparent respectability for a dangerous extremism. The Republican party must repudiate these people.”

The Goldwater crowd gave it right back, interrupting Rockefeller 22 times and booing him lustily for sixteen long minutes while he stood his ground at the podium and insisted on his right to speak.

“This is still a free country, ladies and gentlemen,” Rockefeller smilingly told them, condemning the “infiltration and takeover of established political parties by communist and Nazi methods.”

Rockefeller refused to support Goldwater in the 1964 election. Goldwater was crushed by Lyndon Johnson that November, but the Republican Northeastern establishment would never again control the party. The GOP had begun its horrific, inexorable journey toward Donald Trump, white supremacy, and fascism.

The American Rescue Plan Act--Believe It!

Elections have consequences. Voting does matter. Hard work pays off. Good things happen.

Take yourself back to last October, just six months ago.

Could you have imagined that a bill would be signed into law in this country that would cut childhood poverty in half, give the poorest 20% of Americans a 20% boost in income, lower federal taxes by an average of $3,000 while raising net incomes by nearly 4%, give 70% of those tax reductions to Americans earning less than $95,000 a year, create 7.5 million jobs, give $130 billion to schools, and invest $40 billion in childcare?

Could you have imagined that our government would enact of a piece of legislation that Bernie Sanders would call "the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country”?

You couldn’t have, because it would have been literally impossible.

But thanks to the November election, today Congress passed the America Rescue Plan Act, which accomplishes all of these things and more, and sent it to a President who will sign it into law.

Wait a minute.

Wasn’t it nauseating to watch Joe Manchin force cuts in unemployment benefits during negotiations on the American Rescue bill—cuts that meant that 17 million fewer Americans would benefit from the bill? Absolutely.

Wasn’t it shocking to see seven Democratic Senators vote against including raising the minimum wage to $15 in that bill? Yes.

Does the bill include provisions that have nothing to do with the economic fallout from the pandemic? It does.

Isn’t Rep. Ilham Omar right when she says that the final bill is “a really disappointment development. We obviously are now ultimately sending money to less people than the Trump administration.”? Manchin’s cuts were disappointing, and it’s true that Donald Trump claimed that he supported higher payments than what ended up in the bill. But $422 billion in stimulus payments will be paid out. And Omar is completely ignoring $1.3 TRILLION in other, profound benefits that also help real Americans.

I’ve been looking into the details of the American Rescue bill the past couple of days, and, even with Mancin’s cruel cuts, Sanders’ sky-high praise of the American Rescue is no exaggeration.

If you consider yourself a progressive, you have just won a staggering victory.

If you have despaired of the Democratic Party ever being a unified party that fights for and enacts truly bold, progressive legislation, you have reason for some cautious optimism. Democrats in the Obama era watered down legislation like the ACA in order to get Republican support. That meant that their opening gambits were not bold bills, but weak-tea compromises. The Republicans never voted for any of those bills anyway, and the watered-down bills were justifiably LESS popular—and more difficult to defend.

That didn’t happen this time. The Democrats unveiled a $1.9 TRILLION package of progressive solutions, and despite Manchin’s demands, they passed a $1.9 TRILLION package of progressive solutions by keeping their caucus united—no mean feat. Every Democrat voted for it, and every White Supremacist QAnon Party member voted against it.

Who gets this $1.9 trillion, exactly? Here are the big buckets:

·  27% of the total is going to state and local governments and schools, much of which will make up tax and revenue losses related to the pandemic, avoid massive public-sector layoffs, and help schools reopen.

·  22% of the total bill comes is $422 billion set aside for $1,400-per-person stimulus checks.

·  13% ($246 billion) is for extending additional unemployment funding of $400 a week.

· 12% goes to COBRA subsidies, Affordable Care Act subsidies, lunch programs for children, testing and contact tracing, airlines, medical supplies, small business loans, and grants to restaurants, bars, and music venues.

·  8.5% goes to direct containment measures such as vaccines and testing.

·  15% of the funding goes to policy priorities and projects that are NOT directly related to the current crisis—what the opposition is calling “pork.” This includes $1.5 billion for Amtrak, $480 million for museums and Native American language preservation, $1.5 million for a bridge connecting between Canada and New York State, $50 million for family planning agencies like Planned Parenthood, and $50 million for environmental justice grants for minorities and low-income Americans.

What’s important to remember is that 99% of the money is going to Americans and that 85% of it is pandemic related. The opposition is already claiming that only 9% of the spending in the bill is focused on the pandemic. What they mean is that only money for vaccines and testing have anything to do with COVID-19, and that they are ignoring the catastrophic impact the pandemic has had on businesses and American workers. Not a great message.

There is nothing in the bill that benefits rich Americans. Just ponder THAT for a moment.

Politically, the American Rescue Plan Act puts the Democrats in a very strong position going into the 2022 mid-term elections. Every current White Supremacist QAnon Party member is now on record as having opposed a bill that is supported by 69% of American voters. (84% of Democrats, 65% of independents and 54% of Republicans, according to polls released this week, support the bill.) The Act gives 70% of the tax benefits to Americans who earn less than $95,000 a year—real cash benefits to 70% of all Americans. This time, the Democrats won’t be defending an ineffective compromise bill.

Let’s look at two powerful aspects of the American Rescue Plan Act and see how they will actually impact Americans and how they will play out politically:

·  The most potentially transformative piece of the Act is its expansion of the child tax credit. Before the Act, Americans got a $2,000 yearly tax credit for children from birth through age 16. The American Rescue Plan Act increases this to $3,000 for children aged 6 to 17, and to $3,600 for children 5 and younger. Another new wrinkle is that the tax credits will be sent to eligible families via regular direct deposits starting in July, so they can use the benefits as cash in real time without waiting for tax time to realize them. In addition, these child tax credits will be expanded to 17 MILLION Americans who had been previously ineligible or party ineligible. This is the provision that will cut childhood poverty in half.

·  The American Rescue Plan Act brings about the biggest expansion of federal assistance for health insurance since the Affordable Care Act. Millions of Americans will save hundreds of dollars, if not more, each year on health insurance. A hypothetical 45-year-old making $58,000 now gets no aid under the ACA. With the bill, they'd be entitled to a $1,250 tax credit, or 20% off their premiums, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A 64-year-old making $19,300 already gets generous subsidies that reduce premiums to $800 a year. But with the bill, that person would pay NO premiums for a standard plan.

The expanded child tax credit, with its profound impact on childhood poverty, is set to expire in one year. The Democrats put this item in the bill because they want to make it permanent. In the 2022 midterms, White Supremacist QAnon members will be forced to campaign to end a real benefit that cut childhood poverty in half. The real cost savings for health insurance that the Act will give millions of Americans will further expose the reality that the White Supremacist QAnon Party has had no healthcare plan for eleven years now. Those benefits are also temporary, so the opposition will again be fighting to end an existing benefit. The American Rescue Plan Act will put even more pressure on red states to expand Medicaid. Fourteen states that Trump won in 2020 have expanded Medicaid; twelve red states have refused. This bill offers real relief to real Americans, including Trump supporters. There is no better way to expand your base. This is why the White Supremacist QAnon Party is talking about Dr. Suess and Mr. Potato Head, and not the American Rescue Plan Act.

Legislative wins tend to lead to other legislative wins. This victory gives the Democrats a big win that could translate into political momentum. The Democrats will be under enormous pressure to either kill or defang the filibuster in order to pass the minimum wage and bills on climate change and infrastructure. These measures are extremely popular with the American voters, too.

Again, Bernie Sanders: “I am very proud to say that with this bill, the Congress is finally responding to the pain so many working families in Vermont and all over this country are feeling. Not only are we going to boost stimulus to working parents and their kids by $1,400, we are going to cut childhood poverty in America in half by providing parents with a monthly check of up to $300 per child. I will say that again, because it cannot be understated: with the American Rescue Plan, we are going to cut childhood poverty IN HALF.”

If you are an American progressive, get your head around the profound impact this bill will have. Understand the details in the bill. Take some time to celebrate a major victory. Then get back to the work of keeping up the pressure on Biden and the Democrats (especially Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) to keep delivering.

The following sections give more details about the provisions in the American Rescue Plan Act.

Vaccinations and testing

$160 billion for vaccine and testing programs to help end the pandemic. A national vaccine distribution program that would offer free shots to all U.S. residents regardless of immigration status. Community vaccination centers. Mobile units for rural areas. Rapid-results testing.

Aid to local governments

More than $360 billion in aid for state, local, tribal and territorial governments who have been hammered by higher costs and lower tax revenues due to the pandemic. This money will help them avoid deep cuts to jobs, public health, safety, and education until the pandemic subsides. The Senate bill added $10 billion for critical infrastructure, including broadband internet, and $8.5 billion for rural hospitals.

Unemployment

The supplemental unemployment benefits approved in early stimulus bills runs end on March 14. The Senate bill ensures that a weekly federal unemployment benefit of $300 (reduced from $400 in the House bill) will be extended through September 6 (reduced by a month compared to the House bill) for the unemployed, unemployed people who have exhausted their regular benefits, self-employed people, and gig workers. Households earning up to $150,000 a year will not have to pay taxes on the first $10,200 in unemployment benefits, thus avoiding surprise IRS bills for millions of Americans this spring.

Health coverage

100% coverage for continuing health insurance for laid-off workers. The House version included subsidizing 85% of COBRA premiums for eligible Americans. The bill helps small businesses by reimbursing employers with fewer than 500 employees $1,400 a week and tax credits for the cost of paid leave for employees. The bill does not mandate that employers offer paid leave. The bill would give the Affordable Care Act a boost by increasing subsidies for people who use it purchase health insurance. The Act includes $160 billion for vaccine and rapid-results testing programs to help end the pandemic. A national vaccine distribution program that would offer free shots to all U.S. residents regardless of immigration status. Community vaccination centers. Mobile units for rural areas.

Aid to local governments

More than $360 billion in aid for state, local, and territorial governments that have been hammered by higher costs and lower tax revenues due to the pandemic. This money will help them avoid layoffs and deep cuts to public health, safety, and education until the pandemic subsides. The Senate bill added $10 billion for critical infrastructure, including broadband internet, and $8.5 billion for rural hospitals.

Tax Credits and Childcare

A one-year provision that gives expanded tax credits to low- and middle- income families and make them refundable for 2021. The child tax credit is expanded to $3,000 from $2,000 for each child aged 6 to 17. Children 5 and younger will be eligible for $3,600. The bill would make the full value of the credit available to low-income people who are currently ineligible or receive only a portion. And for the second half of this year, it would have the federal government send advance payments of the credit to Americans in periodic installments. The bill also includes $25 billion to help open child-care centers and $15 billion in grants to support essential workers in meeting childcare costs.

Schools

$130 billion to help K-12 schools open (and, thereby, help women re-enter the workforce) by hiring additional staff to reduce class size, modify spaces and purchase resources. $40 billion for colleges and universities to do likewise. If the Dems can pass a bill forgiving student loans in the future, the American Rescue Act makes that forgiveness tax free.

Rental assistance

The moratoriums on eviction and foreclosure moratorium extended through September. $45 billion to help low-income households who have lost jobs pay rent, mortgages and utility bills. $5 billion to states and localities to offer emergency housing for families facing homelessness.

Airlines and Airports

$14 billion to extend past March 31 a payroll support program for eligible airlines and $1 billion to do the same for contractors to the air carriers. The $8 billion for airports to make changes to facilities or personnel to prevent the spread of Covid-19.

Small businesses

$25 billion to restaurants and $1.25 billion to venue operators to them survive after pandemic lockdowns and closures. $15 billion for targeted Economic Injury Disaster Loans and an additional $7.25 billion for forgivable loans in the Paycheck Protection Program.

Senate Democrats also added the following new provisions to the final bill that were not in the House version:

·  The Senate bill provides $510 million for the FEMA Emergency Food and Shelter Program. That money would support homeless services providers for overnight shelter, meals, one month’s rent and mortgage assistance and one month’s utility payments.

·  The Senate version expands the Employee Retention Tax Credit for start-up companies and other businesses hit by the pandemic.

·  The bill also increases the value of the federal COBRA health insurance program from 85 percent to 100 percent.

·  The bill adds a $10 billion infrastructure program to help local governments continue crucial capital projects.

·  The bill makes all coronavirus-related student loan relief tax-free.

·  The bill increases the total amount of Amtrak relief funding by $200 million.

·  For education funding, the bill sets aside $1.25 billion for summer enrichment; $1.25 billion for after-school programs and $3 billion for education technology

·  The Senate bill also adds $8.5 billion in funds for the Provider Relief Program to assist rural health care providers.

Links:

Analysis by the non-partisan Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center

https://www.bloombergquint.com/politics/what-s-in-the-1-9-trillion-stimulus-bill-passed-by-the-senate

Poverty-Reduction-Analysis-American-Family-Act-CPSP-2020.pdf (squarespace.com)

The American Rescue Plan is Popular and Holds Bipartisan Support (dataforprogress.org)

Child tax credit expansion sets up showdown with GOP (apnews.com)

Study: Poorest Americans would get 20% income boost from Biden relief package - Axios

COVID bill to deliver big health insurance savings for many - ABC News (go.com)

The Trumpilantes

Kyle Rittenhouse is a baby-faced 17-year-old who looks about as menacing as your couch-potato nephew. He wasn’t on the family sofa last night, though. He was in the middle of a street in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he used an AR-15 to murder two people and wound a third.

We’ve gotten used to school shootings. Rather than address their causes and restrict ultra-lethal weapons, we are “hardening” our schools and putting students the same age as Kyle Rittenhouse through shooter drills.

We’ve gotten used to openly racist and fascist statements coming regularly from the White House and White Supremacist Party leaders.

We’ve gotten used to armed people who brandish automatic rifles, storm state capitols, and threaten the lives of public servants in protest of Covid-19 restrictions.

We’ve gotten used to cell-phone videos of white Americans telling fellow Americans of color to “go back to your own country” and anti-maskers physically attacking retail employees.

We’ve gotten used to skyrocketing gun sales—10.3 million firearm transactions so far this year, up 95% over 2019—and even more staggering records in ammunition sales.

We’ve gotten used to the President of the United States flouting the rule of law daily while openly embracing violence and vigilantism. He bragged during his 2016 campaign that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and not lose any voters. Trump has wanted to “punch” protesters in the face. He wants his supportees to “knock the crap out of” demonstrators and offered to pay their legal fees. Trump claimed that there were “some very fine people” in the group of white supremacists who killed a protester by running her over. He called anti-Trump Republicans “human scum.” Trump retweeted a video including the statement that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” He praised a GOP politician who physically assaulted a reporter as “my kind of guy.” He laughed when he asked a crowd at one of his rallies what to do with immigrants and someone shouted out, “Shoot them!” “I have the support,” Trump has boasted, “of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.” In response to the protests over George Floyd’s murder, Trump tweeted “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Trump used secret federal police to beat and tear gas peaceful protesters so that he could stage a photo opportunity. He sent secret federal police to several American cities to foment violence in order to help his re-election. Trump and Attorney General William Barr worked tirelessly to convince Americans that the protests against police violence are the work of antifa, even though none of the hundreds of protesters arrested by federal agents are linked to antifa.

“Trump is a little rough around the edges,” his supporters will tell you. “He was just joking,” they will say. “He just says those things to get the libs angry,” they will cluck.

We’ve forgotten that words matter. We can’t seem to recall Hitler’s grisly speeches, or remember Stanley Milgram’s classic electric-shock experiments and a ton of other data that proves that people are much more likely to inflict pain on others when an authority figure tells them to.

And so we don’t flinch when other White Supremacist Party members mimic the raw cruelty of their leader. It’s not a big deal when a state representative in Missouri posts that “Looters deserve to be shot. But not by the government. #2A.” Energy Secretary Rick Perry must have been just kidding when he suggested that the chairman of the Federal Reserve deserved to be beaten up. And Matt Gaetz was just engaging in harmless lyperbole when he tweeted, “Now that we clearly see Antifa as terrorists, can we hunt them down like we do those in the Middle East?”

We’re gotten used to solitary, lone-wolf white supremacists and alt-right extremists killing us—the racist Dylan Roof who gun downed nine black worshipers as they prayed, the anti-Semite who slaughtered eleven innocents in a Pittsburgh synagogue. The proud racist who killed two African Americans in a Kentucky supermarket. The Trump supporter in Florida who was convicted of mailing pipe bombs to journalists, politicians, and celebrity critics of the president. The alt-right maniac in Portland, Oregon who harassed two Muslim women on a commuter train and then slit the throats of two people who came to their aid. The racist white man who wrote a manifesto about “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” and then gunned down twenty people in El Paso.

We listen with straight faces to Trump and Barr as they downplay right-wing violence to focus on imaginary threats like antifa when statistics show that right-wing extremist violence is this country’s biggest threat. Those are the folks who have committed 70% of extremist-related killings over the past ten years. We don’t listen to the Anti-Defamation League when they point out that thirty-nine of the fifty killings committed by political extremists were carried out by white supremacists, or that another eight murders were committed by killers with anti-government views.

The history of the United States includes a long tradition of vigilante groups, predominantly in the West and South, that has often been used to protect white power—the Ku Klux Klan is the most famous of these. Three things make today’s version of white-supremacist vigilantism especially terrifying.

The first is the fact that the two political parties have become profoundly racialized. The White Supremacist Party is 85% white, and the ranks of its leaders are even whiter. There is a shit ton of data showing that the fear of white displacement is the bond that holds Trump supporters together. Trumpism isn’t a political platform, a collection of core beliefs, or a set of strategies—it’s a fascist cult populated by white people who believe that their racial dominance is coming to an end.

The second is Trump’s panic about the election that is only nine weeks away. Trump is an historically unpopular president who has been losing badly in the polls to Joe Biden all year. His polls are the worst of any incumbent President who ever sought re-election. Thanks to his racism, his totalitarianism, his misogyny, and his spectacular failure to contain the coronavirus, he will lose if the election is a referendum on him. Trump has failed to convince suburban voters that Joe Biden is a radical Marxists or that people of color and illegal immigrants will “destroy the suburbs. Trump needs something big to happen, something that changes the subject, and he needs it to happen now. He’s not going to wait for that something.

The third thing that makes it seem that today we are on the cusp of something far more horrific than the sickening events I’ve already touched on is what we saw last night in Kenosha—a deadly partnership between law enforcement and armed civilians. Kenosah, Wisconsin erupted in violence two days ago after police officers shot an unarmed black man seven times in the back. Last night, a Facebook page belonging to a militia group called the Kenosha Guard called on its 3,000 members to “take up arms and defend our city tonight from evil thugs.”  Kyle Rittenhouse may have been part of a right-wing group that asked the Kenosha police chief on Tuesday to deputize them to assist in keeping the peace in Kenosha. The police chief turned them down, but they showed up anyway. Rittenhouse drove from his home in another state to join a group of armed civilians who were ostensibly guarding a gas station. There is a video showing Kenosha police offering water to the militia members and thanking them for there help. There is also another video, This one shows Rittenhouse, armed with an AR-15, is chased by protesters and falls down. He sits there, right in the middle of the street—not Fifth Avenue in Manhattan but Sheridan Road in Kenosha—and quickly shoots one protestor in the stomach and another in the head. He fires more shots, wounding another protester, and then turns towards police vehicles arriving from the other direction, his AR-15 strapped to his chest and his hands in the air. Rittenhouse is surrendering. The police vehicles go right past him. Nobody lifts a finger against him. After they pass, Rittenhouse realizes he is still a free man and escapes back to his home in Illinois. The next morning he is arrested, without incident and without violence, by the same police who were thanking him the previous night. This evening he will be a poster child for every Trumpist and white-supremacist militia member.

The spectre of a civil war between the police and vigilante militias on the one hand and the rest of the population on the other became very real last night.

We either stop Trump or we get used to his Trumpilantes. No middle ground on this one.

Speakers Schedule for the 2020 White Supremacist Party Convention

The speaker schedule for next week’s White Supremacist Party convention has been announced. Here’s the lineup:

Monday: Faith and Family Night

Invocation by the Rev. Ghislaine Maxwell

Kellyanne Conway sings the national anthem

Opening keynote: Satan—“The Cruelty Is The Point, You Fattened Sheep”

Jerry Fallwell, Jr.: “I Promise That I’ll Be Good From Now This Time for Sure—Please Give Me a Second Chance, Lord, For I Have No Real Skills”

Jeffrey Epstein (holographic image): “When They Go Too Old, We Go Too Young”

Melania Trump: “I Have Wrote This Speech My Own Self”

Donald Trump Jr.: “The Importance of Hard Work and AOC Is a Slut”

Ivanka Trump: “The Future of Branding and Brick-and-Mortar Retail in a World Run by Me and My Dad”

Eric Trump: “It’s Not Easy Being Me: Give Me the Chance To Bankrupt Something, Too”

Mike Pence and Mother Pence: “Loving Intimacy With Your Clothes On” 

Closing: President Donald J. Trump issues pardons to Ghislaine Maxwell, Kellyanne Conway, Jerry Falwell, Jr., Jeffrey Epstein (in memoriam), Donald Trump, Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, and Mike and Mother Pence as they kneel before him. 

Tuesday: Science Night

Flyover by the Red Angels (formerly the Blue Angels)

Invocation by the Rev. Clint Eastwood

That woman who called the cops on the black birdwatcher in Central Park: “Who But Donald Trump Can Save Us From Ornithology and MS-13?”

My Pillow guy: “Turns Out That the Cure for Coronavirus Is in That Can of Weird-Looking Blue Stuff in the Back of Your Garage Stuck Behind the Roundup—See My Website for Details”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio: “Smoking Out the Libtards: The Surprising Upside of the California Wildfires”

Louis Gohmert: “Viagra Safe Practices: The Voice of Experience”

Sean Spicer: “How To Accurately Measure Crowd Size”

Sean Hannity: “Who Says It Can’t Be Done? How To Build a Border Wall That Won’t Fall Over When the Wind Blows Really Hard”

Rudy Guiliani: “If Global Warming Is Real, What Exactly Is in Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian Safe Deposit Box?”

Heinrich Guttman (the last surviving Nazi concentration camp doctor): “Building on the Past: How the Chosen Race Can Replace Obamacare With What We Learned from Our Ingenious Experiments” 

Closing: President Donald J. Trump: “Everyone Is Calling and Telling Me That I Know More About Science Than Any of These Losers and I Aced Some Kind of Scientific Case, So Kiss My Ass”

Wednesday: Donald Trump Is Not a Racist Because He Donated to Kamala Harris’ Campaign and Because He Works Harder Than Any Other President to Make His Skin Darker, the Roll Call of the Red States 

Invocation by the Rev. Pat Robertson (in tasteful blackface)

Kanye West: “I Had to Go to the Hospital Because My Brain Was Too Big for My Skull”

Candace Owens: “Hitler Just Wanted Germany Great and To Have Things Run Well”

Diamond and Silk: “We’re the Land of the Free and the Brave, Not the Home of the Slaves”

Kanye West: “My Greatest Pain in Life Is That I Will Never See Myself Perform Live”

Candace Owens: “The Democrats Want Every Minority Group To Hate White Americans”

Diamond and Silk: “Get Off Your Ass and Get Yourself a Job Conning White People”

Kanye West: “Sometimes Not Giving a F—k Is Caring the Most”

Candace Owens: “George Floyd Being Held Up as a Martyr Sickens Me” 

Diamond and Silk: “What the Hell: Our Fox News Gravy Train Turned Out To Be Run by Racists”

That black guy who holds up the Blacks For Trump signs at the rallies: “I’m Just Trying to Make a Living Out Here”

The Roll Call of the Red States: President Donald J. Trump will win 117% of the votes cast and will be declared the official nominee of the White Supremacist Party

Mike and Mother Pence—”Lord Willing, We Will Still Be on the Ticket After the Ratings Come Out”

Closing: “Let This Be a Lesson to All Traitors”—Attorney General William F. Barr and NRA President Wayne LaPierre shoot rubber bullets at close range at the naked body of Jeff Sessions as they are cheered on by the entire Trump cabinet, followed by the biggest fireworks show the world has ever seen 

Thursday: The Crowning of Our Great Lord and Master

Invocation from the Rev. Mike Ditka

Kid Rock and Ted Nugent perform their original song, “Just Lie Back and Enjoy It”

Thirty-second video: “Suburban Woman (We Could Only Find One, and She Didn’t Have a Ton To Say) for Trump”

The Parade of Allies: Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Recep Erdogan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and that crazy guy who runs the Philippines and likes to personally kill people all offer their sincere congratulations to President Donald J. Trump

In a live videocast from Mara-a-Lago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announces the establishment of DICTO, the new Dictatorships Treaty Organization, a new alliance for the furtherance of democratic dictatorships made up of the United States, Russia, North Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Burundi, Syria, Chad, Rawanda, and Equatorial Guinea

Donald Trump Jr.—“Just in Case Something Happens, I’ll Be Around in 2024”

Closing: President Donald J. Trump—“American Carnage II—Promises Made, Promises Kept”

Followed by the sealing off of Washington, D.C. by armed mercenaries, the ceremonial burning of the Post Office building, and a walk by President Trump to the Lincoln Memorial, where he will hand the 16th President a Sharpie-autographed copy of “The Art of the Deal” as very, very large tanks methodically destroy the streets of our nation’s capitol. Followed by a COVID-19 party on the Mall attended by the largest crowd in human history.

The Waterboarding of the Electorate

In hindsight, it’s amazing that John Yoo and Donald Trump didn’t find each other sooner.

Together, they are claiming—based on an absurd “legal” argument that has already taken hold in the White Supremacist Party—vast, dictatorial powers for the Presidency that will result in an avalanche of extralegal executive orders from now until Election Day that will fuck up this country for years to come.

John Yoo is an attorney who has aggressively laid claim to being the world’s leading expert in an area of the law that no adjudicator with any morality would even conceive of owning—using the law to justify monstrous acts that would be unthinkable in any civilized society.

It was John Yoo who, as a lawyer in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, argued that the President had the power to monitor the communications of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil without a warrant. But Yoo is most infamous for authoring a legal finding that justified the torture of prisoners in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay by the CIA. Yoo based his memo on an 1873 Supreme Court ruling that Modoc Indians could legally be shot on sight. He claimed that the “president’s war-making authority was so broad that he had the constitutional power to order a village to me ‘massacred.’” Asked in 2005 “if the President deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is now law that can stop him?’”, Yoo answered “I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.” Clearly, Yoo was born too late to fill his dream job—as the head of Hitler’s National Socialist League of German Jurists.

Colin Powell denounced Yoo’s findings as being counter to the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. Navy general counsel called Yoo’s memo “catastrophically poor legal reasoning.” The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel declared Yoo’s conclusions legally unsound, and its Office of Professional Responsibility found that Yoo had “committed professional misconduct.” Journalist Glenn Greenwald and the dean of the University of California law school argued that Yoo should be indicted for war crimes, and at least two European countries seriously considered doing so.

As a candidate in 2016, Donald Trump took a much more favorable view of Yoo’s handiwork, declaring that as President he would “bring back waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse.” John Yoom clearly, is Donald Trump’s kind of Presidential lawyer.

Nightmarish stuff, but what has this got to do with Trump’s executive orders? If we go back a couple of months, the link between Yoo and Trump becomes clear.

On June 18, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump had acted illegally when he repealed Obama’s executive order creating the DACA program. It was a very narrowly defined decision. The Supreme Court did not rule of the constitutionality of Obama’s executive order. It did not decide that Trump lacked the power to repeal it. It blocked Trump’s repeal on the grounds that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security failed to “provide a reasoned explanation for its action” or address “the hardship to DACA recipients.” It didn’t say that Trump couldn’t repeal Obama’s order, it said that Trump didn’t follow the right process in doing so.

John Yoo, who is now a professor at the same University of California law school that once called him a war criminal, saw something in the decision that appealed to his love for unlimited presidential power

On July 19, Axios reported that an upcoming National Review article by John Yoo had been spotted on Trump’s Oval Office desk. In the article,  Yoo argued that the Supreme Court’s DACA ruling “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law.” You can imagine Trump’s response to this claim. Yoo confirmed to Axios that he had met virtually with White House officials about his theory, and Axios reported that Trump had been sharing the article with key advisers.

That same day, Trump told Chris Wallace in a Fox News interview that the Supreme Court had recently given him extended powers and that he would exercise those powers to issue decrees on healthcare, immigration, and “various other plans.” Trump told Wallace that “we’re signing a health-care plan within two weeks.”

On June 20, Yoo explained his theory further to the Guardian: “If the court really believes what it just did, then it just handed President Trump a great deal of power, too. The Supreme Court has said President Obama could [choose not to] enforce immigration laws for about two million cases. And why can’t the Trump administration do something similar with immigration—create its own…program, but it could do it in areas beyond that, like healthcare, criminal justice, inner city policy. I talked to them a fair amount about cities, because of the disorder.”

On June 22, the conservative National Review finally published the article that had made such an enormous impact in the White House. In it, Yoo laid out his theory that that the Supreme Court’s DACA decision “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law, but reversing such violations difficult—especially for their successors” and detailed a frightening example of the enormous power that, in his view, the Supreme Court had just granted to the President. “Suppose President Donald Trump decided to create a nationwide right to carry guns openly,” Yoo wrote. “He could declare that he would not enforce federal fireams laws, and that a new ‘Trump permit’ would free any holder of state and local gun-control restrictions. Even if Trump knew that his scheme lacked legal authority, he could get away with it for the length of his presidency. And, moreover, even if courts declared the permit illegal, his successor would have to keep enforcing the program for another year or two.”

Consistent with their conversations with Yoo about “disorder” in American cities, on July 4th Trump deployed federal agents to Portland, Oregon, supposedly to protect federal properties, a move that ignited a national debate on whether such an executive order was legal.

Four days later, on July 8, the Justice Department announced the launch of Operation Legend, under which federal agents were sent to Kansas City, Missouri, to crack down on protests there after the murder of George Floyd.

On July 22, Trump announced that Operation Legend was being expanded to Albuquerque, Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.

On July 27, White Supremacist Party Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell unveiled his caucus’ plan for the next round of coronavirus relief legislation. Yoo confirmed to Axios that he had met virtually with White House officials about his theory. House Democrats had passed their second coronavirus relief bill on May 15, but McConnell waited until a week before extra unemployments benefits and moratoriums on rent and evictions were set to expire to unveil his bill. To make matters worse for McConnell and the White House, it became immediately clear that at least half of the White Supremacist Party Senators were opposed to the plan, which meant that McConnell could not pass a bill without the support of Democratic senators. This put Pelosi and Schumer in the driver’s seat as negotiations on a compromise bill began. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin had brokered the first coronavirus relief bill with Pelosi and Schumer last spring, but many folks in the Trump administration felt that Pelosi had gotten the better of him, so White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who was certainly aware of the new Yoo theory of expanded Presidential power via executive orders, was added to the negotiation team. Little progress was made during the next two weeks, primarily due to Meadow’s refusal to compromise, and Trump began to threaten to solve the impasse by issuing executive orders.

On August 6, Trump signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to purchase “essential drugs” and medical supplies made in the U.S., rather than from the foreign companies that currently provide most of those.

On August 7, negotiations on the second coronavirus relief bill collapse.

The very next day, Trump surfaced with four completed executive orders related to coronavirus relief and signed them. The orders deferred payroll taxes for Americans earning less than $100,000 a year (those taxes fund Social Security and Medicaid), implemented a moratorium on evictions and gave financial assistance to renters, added $400 a week in extra unemployment benefits through the end of 2020 (IF financially strapped states can somehow cover 25% of the cost), and postponed student loan interest payments through the end of 2020.

Later the same day, Trump tweeted that he was “pursuing a major executive order requiring health insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions”—even though, thanks to Obamacare, this has been the law of the land for ten years. The Trump campaign called this “huge news.”

Yesterday, White Supremacist Party Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska slams Trump’s coronavirus-aid executive, saying that “The pen-and-phone theory of executive lawmaking is unconstitutional slop.”

In an interview this morning with CNN, White House economic advisor Kudlow admitted that he regrets saying just a few days ago that unemployment benefits could only be extended by Congress. And Treasury Secretary told Fox News today that Trump’s executive orders on coronavirus aid were cleared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and said that Democrats are going to “have a lot of explaining to do” if they challenge them in court.

Donald Trump has never shown any inclination to do the hard work of negotiating with Democrats and his own party on legislation. The “master of the deal” has turned out to be the worst deal maker in American presidential history. Trump has utterly rejected the very concept, much less the crystal-clear constitutional provisions for, Congressional oversight of the Executive branch. As he has repeatedly shown—through his illegal travel ban, his elimination of government regulations, his firings of multiple inspectors general, his refusal to allow any members of his administration to testify before Congress—his idea of the way America should work is as a fascist state where he makes the law and spends the taxpayers’ money, regardless of what the Constitution and over two hundred years of legal precedent say. And Congress’ failure to impeach Trump, thanks to the unwillingness of the White Supremacist Party to live up to their oaths to uphold the Constitution, left him with no further impediments to realize his authoritarian vision.

In the tortured legalistic spins of John Yoo, Trump has found not only the slim legal justification he didn’t even really need to move forward, but the realization that he can spend the 80-plus days between now and the election trying to win votes by ignoring Congress and issuing a blizzard of delusional (but real, in the sense that they will preoccupy the country and derail real efforts to fix our problems) executive orders on the coronavirus, guns, healthcare, immigration and god knows what else.

Actually, we know “what else” will include. We will surely see, before November 3, executive orders from an American President explicitly interfering with the election itself. Trump’s only talent is creating chaos, and after November 3, 2020 the last remaining pillars of a representational democracy in this country—the belief of most Americans that our elections are legitimate and the quick and peaceful transference of power following those elections—will be a dim memory.

Another Night in Fascist America

Until last night, the only time I was teargassed was in November of 1969, so I guess I was due. In 1969 it was Nixon who gassed me in Washington, D.C.; last night it was Trump who made my eyes sting in my home, Portland. Not the kind of lifetime bookends I would have chosen for myself, but it is what it is.

I hadn’t participated in the more than 50 straight days of protests here in Portland until last night. I visit my 93-year-old mother twice a week, so I have been very careful about Covid-19. But Trump’s deployment of secret police in my city solely for the purpose of providing video footage for his campaign ads was too much for me, and yesterday I felt like I had to show up in person down at the Hatfield Court House, which Trump’s stormtroopers are “protecting.”

The fundamental thing that people need to know about what is happening here in Portland is that the skirmishes are limited to the evening and early-morning hours and to a single city block in downtown Portland. Ninety-nine percent of daily life here is completely normal. Portland is not being vandalized, looted, or set ablaze.

I got town to the courthouse about 8:30 last night. The courthouse is an ideal location for a protest because, although it is smack in the middle of downtown Portland, there is a park across the street. So for the past fifty-eight consecutive nights protesters have gathered in that park. So the protests predate the presence of Trump’s secret police—those goons arrived a little over two weeks ago.

The rationale for the arrival of this motley crew of untrained, brutal thugs was the protection of the federal courthouse building. The damage to the courthouse before their arrival was graffiti. Some small fires were also lit in the street in front of the building, but there were no conflagrations inside the building—no arson. This is still the case today. The “damage” to the courthouse is still limited to graffiti.

We don’t know how many fascist police Trump has sent to Portland to battle this wave of graffiti. He refuses to say. What we do know is that the size of the demonstrations, which had been winding down, has exploded exponentially since their arrival. This is surprising to exactly no one. Two nights ago, 4,000 Portlanders protested. Last night’s crowd was estimated to be about 5,000—the largest one yet.  

I got to the courthouse about 8:30 last night. There were probably a couple of thousand people there. The secret police have set up a metal barricade in front of the courthouse, and it had been decorated with flowers and BLM posters. I brought some swim goggles, water, and a bandana, but I felt severely under-prepared as I scanned my fellow protesters. Most of them were wearing ski helmets and ski goggles. Some had full-on, pro gas masks. Several were wearing leaf blowers, which they have been using to blow tear gas back toward the secret police. The food kitchens in the park that had been destroyed the night before by the secret police were back up and running—barbecue AND vegan. There were groups of nurses in their medical scrubs, teachers, more children than I would have expected, and a really fine contingent of drummers.

One important point: many in the black community (Portland’s is small—about 6% of the population) have expressed their concerns, often angrily, that the nightly skirmishes had obscured the original Black Lives Matter focus on addressing systemic racism in the police force. It is a totally legitimate concern, and there is a lot of truth in it. I can tell you that Black Lives Matter was the theme last night, and that black organizers were leading the crowd. It’s also true, of course, that it’s important to protest the invasion of your city by secret police, so there was a strong message of “Feds out of Portland,” too.

Around ten o’clock a speaker addressing the crowd pointed out that the tactic of confronting the secret police on their federal turf night after night was questionable. She spoke of the need to spread the protest out to other areas in Portland that were not under federal control. She told us that organizers had learned that the secret police were being housed in the Marriott Hotel several blocks away, down on the river, and within minutes most of the crowd, including me, was marching over to the Marriott.

We surrounded the Marriott on two sides and filled the circular driveway in front of the hotel. I couldn’t see any guests in the lobby, and nearly all of the windows in the hotel were dark. This tactic made a ton of sense to me. If the Marriott truly is housing the secret police (several folks on Facebook are claiming this, but I haven’t seen it confirmed in the regular media), then targeting them and hurting Marriott’s business is not only legitimate but important. And moving the focus to the Marriott moves the protests off federal territory and the turf of the secret police. Trying to shut down the Marriott would certainly being about a confrontation with law enforcement, but it would most likely be with the Portland police (who showed a lot of brutality before the arrival of the feds) and not the secret police.

But we didn’t attempt to shut down the Marriott. Around 11:00 we marched back to the courthouse, where we joined a large crowd in the park. There were about 5,000 protesters at this point.

Most of the confrontations with the secret police have happened between 11:00 p.m. and 2 a.m., so at this point we were in that skirmish time zone, and you could feel a heightened awareness in the crowd. Protesters shined bright floodlights into the front of the courthouse. Green lasers were flashed against the sides of the courthouse and nearby buildings at spots where protesters thought that secret police were stationed.

At around 11:30, a really loud boom went off in front of the courthouse, and then another. Protesters were setting off fireworks. Some of them were launched skyward at the sides of the buildings. I was toward the back of the crowd after the march to the Marriott, so I couldn’t see what was happening right in front of the courthouse. More fireworks, and then I saw a cloud launched in front of the courthouse and billow into the air. I couldn’t tell if it was smoke from the fireworks or tear gas, but the crowd booed loudly. About two minutes later, a much larger cloud appeared and wafted toward the crowd, and people began hustling past me, away from the courthouse. I was just getting my goggles out of my pocket when my eyes started watering and I realized that the cloud of tear gas had reached me. I turned and started moving toward the back of the park. Just a few minutes, I thought, and then I’ll be out of this, but then a much stronger cloud of tear gas reached me from another direction, and for a second I thought that I was disoriented and was heading INTO the gas, not away from it.

That tear gas really does the job. It’s very nasty shit. People were wretching and moaning and rubbing their eyes. I must have been stumbling around, because a good samaritan came up to me and asked me if I’d like my eyes cleaned out. “Yes, please,” I said and he had me tip my head back and blink while he poured saline solution in my eyes. I doused my bandana with my water bottle and wiped the stinging gas off my face with it as I got further way. The Covid mask I was wearing kept from breathing very much of the gas.

On Fifth Avenue I passed a four-person, constantly flowing drinking fountain. A suburban-looking father and his two sons, who looked to be about ten and twelve, were washing their red eyes with handfuls of water from the fountain. “See, boys,” he told them. “That’s how it’s done.”

I headed out of the park, found my car, and went home. I found out today that the secret police did emerge and clear the area, but not until much later—around 2 a.m.

Did we score any tactical victories last night? Not really, but the feint to the Marriott is a tactic that should be followed up on. We don’t need to target the courthouse every night.

Are the secret police any closer to leaving Portland? Nope.

Then what’s the point?

Protests are not like wars. Their value is not based on body counts or territory taken. Protests are statements—they are the antithesis of silence, which is tacit approval and a different kind of violence. Most of all, their power is in their ability to outlast even the most repressive response.

A reporter from the Portland Oregonion spent last night inside the courthouse with the secret police and wrote an article about her experience in today’s paper. She wrote that “Federal agents said they are wearing of the nightly protests.” She interviewed one of them.

“We’re just not getting anywhere,” he said. “If they just stayed off the fence and weren’t being aggressive towards us, we’d just be inside twiddling our thumbs. … I don’t think there’s an end in sight. They don’t want to stop but we can’t leave this building until they leave us alone. The ‘give’ has to ‘give’ on the outside of the fence.”

This the fundamental delusion of so-called “moderates” who criticize the protesters when their city is invaded by the secret police—claiming that the protesters are playing into their hands while ignoring that their city has been invaded by a secret police force and acquiescence and passivity in the face of that means that the fascists will have won.

This is also the fundamental delusion of the committed fascist—that if more and more pressure and violence are brought to bear, citizens—who have stood up to protest exactly that violence—will respond by giving up.

We can do this forever, and we will until the “give” happens on the other side of that fence—inside that courthouse. That courthouse is OUR courthouse, not the secret police’s, and we will outlast them. Iit is we who will one day bring THEM to justice—in a courtroom iinside that very same building.

Cancelling Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Jefferson

I had a Facebook exchange with an old friend the other day. My friend is liberal, free-thinking, and educated, and a good and spiritual person. He was decrying the “cancel culture,” which he defines as “erasing” people from history. He was fine with removing the Confederate statues, but he felt “differently” about historical figures like Washington and Jefferson, who he felt needed to be looked at “in the context of their time.”

Like millions of other Americans, he was saying that you can’t fairly apply today’s standards of beliefs or behavior to people who lived two hundred years ago. The implication is that today’s standard of beliefs or behavior didn’t exist then, or weren’t accepted to the degree they are now.

Well, okay, let’s take a look, then, at Thomas Jefferson. He is a good candidate because he made some remarkable contributions to this country and therefore could never be “erased” from our history, he had conflicted beliefls about racism (still the biggest issue in America), he had the opportunity to address racism in his country, he is a person who behaved monstrously, and because if we don’t understand a person as historically prominent as Jefferson for what he really was, we have no future as a nation.

We have forgotten how long humans have debated slavery. Movements to end the practice of slavery began in Europe in the thirteenth century, In 1315, Spain abolished slavery (inside its border, not in their colonies). The Catholic Church condemned slavery in the seventeenth century. The debate about slavery in American began with the first settlements. In 1732, Englishman James Oglethorpe founded the American colony of Georgia and abolishes slavery there. A strong abolitionist movement was founded in Canada during first half of the eighteenth century.

Let’s map Jefferson’s actions to what was going on in his world during his own lifetime.

Thomas Jefferson is born in Virginia in 1743.

The first court cases in the British Isles challenging the legality of slavery take place in Scotland in 1755 and 1769.

In 1772, Jefferson marries Martha Wayles. The following year, Martha’s father John Wayles dies, and Martha Jefferson inherits several of his slaves, including an infant named Sally Hemmings and her brother James. Under Virginia law, Sałly and James Hemmings are black slaves. But in fact, they are three-quarters European, because both their grandfather and their father were white men who had sexually abused slave concubines and had fathered children with them. Sally and James Hemmings are also the half-sister and half-brother of Jefferson’s wife Martha, as a man named John Wales is the father of all three of them, and this fact is not only known to all but explains why the two slaves move to Monticello with Martha,

The history of the attempts to end slavery in the American colonies begins with Thomas Jefferson in 1775. The slaveholder Jefferson includes strong anti-slavery language in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, but other delegates remove it. What does survive is his famous preamble: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

The American colonies proclaim themselves to be a sovereign nation, and the Revolutionary War against Great Britain begins.

In 1775 Jefferson’s close friend Benjamin Franklin helps found the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery, the first recognized organization for abolitionists in the United States.

In 1778, Vermont becomes the first state to abolish slavery.

In 1780, Pennsylvania abolishes slavery.

In 1782, Jefferson’s wife Martha dies.

In 1784, Jefferson is appointed as the American envoy to France. He moves to Paris with his household, which includes Sally Hemmings, who is twelve, and her brother James. While in Paris, Jefferson has both Sally and James tutored in French. James Hemmings, then 19, is also trained as a chef. Jefferson is heavily influenced by his experience living in France during the Age of Enlightenment. He becomes familiar with the writings of several French philosophers who are opposed to slavery and its moral and economical justifications, including Montesquieu and Brissot, who founds the Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Société des Amis des Noirs) to work for the abolition of slavery.

In 1787, the Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade is formed in Great Britain, and abolitionism becomes an issue in the parliamentary campaign.

In 1789, Jefferson impregnates Sally Hemmings for the first time. She is 16, so this is legally child rape. Slavery is abolished in France that same year, which means that Sally and James Hemmings can petition the government for their freedom. Jefferson becomes concerned that Sally and James Hemmings will learn of this and writes about his apprehension to another American slaveholder who is a similar position. Jefferson pays Sally Hemmings a monthly wage while they are in Paris so as not to run afoul of the new prohibition of slavery in France. (According to an 1873 interview with Sally’s son Madison, Sally does learn about her right to sue for her freedom and considers doing just that.) In the end, she returns to Virginia with Jefferson after he promises her that he will free her children when they reach the age of twenty-one. Back in Virginia at his estate at Monticello, Jefferson has a passageway built between his room and hers so that he can visit her at night without disturbing the household.

In 1791, Jefferson accepts President Washington’s invitation to serve as Secretary of State. This means moving his household to Philadelphia, which is the nation’s capitol. But slavery is banned in Pennsylvania,, so, to stay on the good side of the law in that state, Jefferson has to pay Sally and James Hemings salaries during his stay there.

In 1793, Jefferson decides to return to Virginia. James Hemmings, Jefferson’s son and chef, is understandably reluctant to return to a slave state, so he negotiates a signed contract with Jefferson that includes this promise: “Having been at great expence [sic] in having James Hemings taught the art of cookery, desiring to befriend him, and to require from him as little in return as possible, I hereby do promise & declare, that if the said James should go with me to Monticello in the course of the ensuing winter, when I go to reside there myself, and shall there continue until he shall have taught such person as I shall place under him for that purpose to be a good cook, this previous condition being performed, he shall thereupon be made free by which he will gain freedom after training a replacement chef at Monticello to take his place.”

In 1792, France grants full citizenship free people of color in that country.

In 1796, during the nation’s first contested presidential election, the newspaper “Gazette of the United States” publishes an article accusing Jefferson of carrying on an affair with Sally Hemings.

In 1796, Jefferson grants his son James his freedom.

In 1801, Jefferson is elected President.

In 1802, political journalist James Callender writes in a Richmond newspaper that Jefferson has for many years "kept, as his concubine, one of his own slaves." "Her name is Sally," Callender writes, adding that Jefferson had "several children" by her. Callender's article spreads the story widely, it appears in political cartoons, and it is taken up by Jefferson's Federalist opponents and is published in many newspapers. Jefferson does not respond to the charge, publicly or privately..

1804 politica cartoon about Jefferson and Sally Hemmings

By 1804, all the northern states in the United States have abolished slavery.

In 1804, Haiti, a former French slave colony, declares its independence and abolishes slavery. This causes shockwaves in the United States. It energizes the abolitionist movement and creates a surge of fear about slave rebellions among American slaveowners.

In 1807, the British Parliament outlaws slavery in the British Empire. That same year President Jefferson signs the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves, which means that no new slaves can be imported to the United States. Jefferson has sired five children with Sally Hemmings by this time.

During the period between 1810 and 1826, slavery is abolished in most of Latin America.

During these years, Sally Hemings keeps her children close by while she works as a chambermaid and seamstress at Monticello. According to her son Madison, while young, the children "were permitted to stay about the 'great house', and only required to do such light work as going on errands.” At the age of 14, each of the children begin their training: the brothers as carpenters, and Harriet as a spinner and weaver. The three boys all learn to play the violin, which Jefferson himself plays. Several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believe that he is the father of Sally Hemings's children, and there are several contemporary accounts noting how closely Hemmings’ children resemble Jefferson.

In 1820 Jefferson privately supports the Missouri Compromise, believing that it may help end slavery.

In 1821, Jefferson writes this about slavery in his autobiography: "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, then these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government."

In 1822, at the age of 24, Sally and Jefferson’s son Beverley leaves Monticello and heads north. Per Jefferson’s promise to Sally, he is not pursued. His sister Harriet Hemings is allowed to leave the next year, after turning 21. Beverley and Harriet, being seven-eighths European in ancestry, both enter white society in Washington, D.C., and each marries well. 

In an 1824 letter, Jefferson laments that the nation cannot find a practical way to abolish slavery, writing "But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.”

Jefferson dies bankrupt in 1826. George Washington freed all of his slaves in his will, but Jefferson’s will frees only the five male slaves from the extended Hemmings family, including his sons Madison and Eston. Jefferson’s slaves and and other property are sold to pay off his debts.

Sally Hemings is not granted her freedom in Jefferson’s will. She is withheld from auction and allowed to leave Monticello by Jefferson's daughter, Martha Jefferson Randolph—who is also Sally’s niece. Hemings lives free in Virginia with her sons Madison and Eston in nearby Charlottesville for the next nine years until she dies in 1835.

Both Madison and Eston Hemmings marry feee women of color in Charlottesville. After their mother's death, they and their families move to Ohio, where they are listed as “mulattos” in census records. Even though he is legally a free person, Eston Hemings and his family move to Madison, Wisconsin, to be farther away from slave catchers. He lives as a white man from that time on, changes his name to Eston H. Jefferson, and becomes a professional musician and bandleader.

Madison Hemings' family are the only Hemings descendants who continue to identify with the black community. Over time, some of their descendants pass into the white community, while others continue to identify as blacks.

After Jefferson’s death, his white family begins vigorously denying the allegations about Sally Hemmings. Jefferson’s grandson claims in the 1850s that the father of Sally’s children was Peter Carr, Jefferson’s nephew, and this story becomes the accepted history.

In 1873, Madison Hemming is interviewed by an Ohio newspaper and states that Thomas Jefferson was his father. "I was named Madison by the wife of James Madison, who was afterwards President of the United States,” Madison states. “Mrs. Madison  happened to be at Monticello at the time of my birth, and begged privilege of naming me, promising my mother a fine present for the honor. She consented, and Mrs. Madison dubbed me by the name I now acknowledge, but like many promises of white folks to the slaves she never gave my mother anything.” Eston Hemmings also tells interviewers that Jefferson was his father.

For the next 150 years historians deny Jefferson’s paternity.

This begins to change with the publication of Annette Gordon-Reed’s book “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” that analyzed the historiography of the controversy.

In 1998 a DNA analysis shows no match between Peter Carr’s descendants and Sally Hemmings’ descendants, but the test do show a match between Thomas Jefferson’s descendants and a descendant of Eston Hemmings.

In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs Monticello, conducts an independent review that concludes that Jefferson was probably the father of all of Sally Hemmings’ children, but other Jefferson descendants continue to resist this finding, with some of them fingering Jefferson’s brother Randolph as the father.

So what is the “context” by which we should appropriately judge Jefferson?

Did Thomas Jefferson make enormous contributions to American history? Absolutely. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, a document that has inspired millions, served as envoy to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president. He engineered the Louisiana Purchase and financed the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Did he live in a Virginia society that legalized slavery and turned a blind eye to the abuse of slaves as sexual concubines? Yes.

Was Jefferson a racist? Obviously, he was much worse than that.

Did he live in a world that unquestioningly accepted slavery? No. The debate about the abolition of slavery began in Europe in the fourteenth century. It was condemned by Catholic Popes. During Jefferson’s lifetime it was outlawed in most of Europe, including France, a country that Jefferson greatly admired, and in most of the United States. Jefferson was a Southerner, yes, but he was also an Anamerican—and a well-traveled, learned one to boot. Many of Jefferson’s friends, such as Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and John Adams, were committed abolitionists. Jefferson himself believed that slavery was wrong, but, unlike Washington, he did not free his slaves (except for his own slave children) upon his death.

Were these base actions of Jefferson’s rare and unusual—out of character? Hardly. Owning slaves and sexually abusing them was a part of Jefferson’s daily existence for most of his adult life.

Did Jefferson’s sordid personal life have an impact on his politics—specifically, his views on race? Of course. He was unable to square the circle of his racism and his interracial family, and this is reflected in his inconsistent and hypocritical views on race and his politics.

Did Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings lead him to commit acts that were considered monstrous during his life? Yes. Jefferson’s sexual appetite led him to rape a child who was his wife’s half sister, father six children out of wedlock, keep those children as his own household slaves during his lifetime, use the prospect of freeing his slave children as a negotiating tool to keep his slave concubine from leaving him, maintain a fiction of paying his own slave children wages so as not to run afoul of the law, and to not free the mother of his six children even after he died. These were all horrific acts (if not uncommon ones) even according the morality of the time, and the fact that their existence was used against him politically, and then denied for 150 years to protect his reputation, is proof of that such acts were far from acceptable in American society.

Is there really any kind of historical “context” that could ameliorate or soften Jefferson’s horrific acts? No. Jefferson’s long catalogue of behavior agalinst slaves, many of whom where his own children, were never officially accepted as legitimate behavior in early America.

Okay, so Jefferson was both an illustrious champion of freedom AND a loathsome scoundrel. So what?

It’s important to accept trhe historical reality of both sides of Jefferson because his personal duality is a perfect mirror of the history of the United States, which is both revolutionary and despicable. THIS is the discussion millions of us are trying at long last to have in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. If blacks and whites can’t talk about the real Thomas Jefferson, we’re sunk.

U.S, Senator Tom Cotton, who has railed against “cancel culture,” has introduced the Saving of American History Act of 2020, a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds to teach the 1619 Project by K-12 schools or school districts. Schools that teach the 1619 Project would also be ineligible for federal professional-development grants. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who oversaw the 1619 Project, describes it this way:

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

In other words, the 1619 Project is focused on exposing just the kind of monstrous schizophrenia about race that Jefferson embodied. (Just yesterday, Cotton called slavery “a necessary evil” in the history of the United States. He only got the second half right. )

In an interview in 2000, the historian Annette Gordon-Reed said of the change in historical scholarship about Jefferson and Hemings: "Symbolically, it's tremendously important for people ... as a way of inclusion. Nathan Huggins said that the Sally Hemings story was a way of establishing black people's birthright to America."

Having this conversation is not “cancel culture.” No one will ever erase Thomas Jefferson from American history, whether you believe that there should be statues of Jefferson or monuments to him or not. The outraged claims of “cancel culture” are just the latest in a cursed series of dodges that we Americans have used for over four hundred years to avoid having a real conversation or historical accounting of it. And until we have this conversation, there is no possible way forward for us.